Fallout detected!

[Ags]

I heard elsewhere on the forum that trees absorb fallout from nuclear accidents like Chernobyl, and this pollution is further concentrated in wood ash. On the same thread I learned that radiation leaves detectable trails on astro cameras, like the following.

Sometimes the radiation particle makes an easily distinguished streak like the above. Other times the strike is visible as a cluster of bright pixels instead.

I have collected 2.4 kgs of wood ash and made minute long dark frame exposures with the camera on top of the ashpile (131 subs) and a similar number of control subs (120) . The goal was 200 of each but SharpCap crashed twice. Of course confirmation bias may rear its head here, but I count 16 strikes for the ash-exposed run versus 8.7 for the control (a fractional amount because I adjusted for the different number of subs in each run). The green-dot one is exposed to ash, while the red-dot one is the control. 

The subs were stacked using the brightest pixel from each sub. The same subs in each run were separately stacked as darks.

 

Edited January 22 by Ags

[happy-kat]

I find these interesting and in the Astro images taken I've been thinking they were cosmic rays, I've also found the all sky camera more likely to pick them up and get a nice colourful steak.

[Ags]

There is a natural level of background radiation so the traces are not necessarily cosmic rays, although that would be very cool! I was just trying to see if I could detect a signal from something terrestrial. I hear a lump of granite is also a good thing to try.

[Bugdozer]

As someone who enjoys radiation, I think this is fascinating. The number of strikes you got from the ash versus the control looks too high to be just down to statistical variation. 

[Ags]

i did an earlier run of 1 hour each for ash and control, with less ash and I got an 11 vs 7 result, which seemed quite inconclusive. I wanted to try again with three hours of data each for ash and control with a lot more ash, but Sharpcap kept crashing, so I ended up with two hours on each.