Student Captures Cosmic Radiation on Film by Sending Negative to Space
A photography student successfully captured cosmic radiation on film by sending a color negative into space. Tom Liggett's project involved launching weather balloons to over 121,000 feet, where the film was exposed to various forms of radiation. The resulting image features vibrant colors and patterns, showcasing the interaction between the film and cosmic energies.
- ▪Tom Liggett is a third-year photography student at the Arts University Bournemouth in the U.K.
- ▪He launched a series of weather balloons with a 5×4 color negative attached to them to capture cosmic radiation.
- ▪The film was exposed to extreme levels of cosmic radiation and high-energy particles during its ascent and descent.
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| Original publisher | PetaPixel |
| Canonical URL | https://petapixel.com/2026/05/24/student-captures-cosmic-radiation-on-film-by-sending-negative-to-space/ |
| Publication time | Sun, 24 May 2026 11:00:02 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-24T11:07:32.394Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-24T11:07:32.394Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | DSlCaNvkP5nR |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Student Captures Cosmic Radiation on Film by Sending Negative to Space May 24, 2026 Matt Growcoot HELIOS II by Tom Liggett. Most of the colors captured here were caused by cosmic radiation that came from the distant Universe. The yellow bloom at the top, however, was caused by a tree that pierced the bag during the descent. A photography student sent a 5×4 color negative into space on April 19 and exposed it to cosmic radiation, capturing a beautiful, abstract portrait of space unlike anything done before.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at PetaPixel.
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