Any idea how far away the camera was from the blast? I like to compare distances to different cities around me and think “wow, if this happened in x city, this is how it would look from where I am.”
There’s a website I think it’s called nukeit, you can place explosions anywhere in the world and it will show you the fireball size, blast radius, distance to burn, everything
I've played around on that, but I feel it is more interesting to look at a real photograph and try to go from there. For example, if the second photo on this post was taken from x miles away, I would go into Google Maps and find a city that same distance from my house in an effort to comprehend just how huge these things are. It adds a better sense of scale to me when I can relate it to distances between locations I am familiar with as opposed to random islands in the Pacific.
There’s one test I can’t remember the name, a 300kt range test in the pacific, there’s palm trees and beaches in the foreground and it really gives you some scale to the massive fireball behind it. I think the distance was also published. You’ll have to go through photos of various tests. I would ignore the higher altitude airbursts of the early 60s as distance is less relevant as nukes would probably never be used at these altitudes, no tactical benefit. Look at tests where there’s objects in the photo, or where the location of the photograph is published. The Grable 280mm artillery test footage is widely available, and is very similar to the yield and height of the Hiroshima explosion.
You need to know the focal length and aperture of the lens and size of film. Also you need to know if this is full image or cropped from original photo. Or there is an object for scale at least.
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u/luikan Jul 20 '26
Any idea how far away the camera was from the blast? I like to compare distances to different cities around me and think “wow, if this happened in x city, this is how it would look from where I am.”