No, that is not a picture of the Sun to the right. Rather it is what it would look like if a nuclear weapon detonated at night, 2 miles over your head.
History will always associate the U.S. with the discovery, testing, and war-time employment of nuclear weapons. The U.S. conducted 219 atmospheric nuclear tests alone between 1945 and 1962. If one includes exo-atmospheric, underground, and underwater, there were 1,054 tests. Since 1962, most of the films that captured the atmospheric tests (over 10,000, as multiple cameras were used during a test) have been slowly decomposing, scattered across the country in high-security vaults.
While a dark topic, it is never-the-less important for a nation to preserve it's history. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has therefore recently been authorized to collect and scan these films into digital form. This takes a great amount of time, but a few are already viewable on YouTube.
While the preservation of these films is valuable for posterity's sake, new things are now being learned with 21st-century technology that wasn't possible 55 years ago. As such, these films continue to contribute data to current and future weapon physicists.
Housatonic (pictured above) was one of many tests as part of Operation Dominic in 1962. Housatonic was a low-altitude test delivered via airdrop and detonated at 12,100 ft, (just over 2 miles above the surface).
This is a link to one of these new films.
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