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Technology

Gallery: Painting with ice and light

By Lucy Dodwell

21 January 2009

Âé¶¹´«Ã½. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

Click the link in the article to see more frizions like this one

(Image: Peter Wasilewski)

The image, right, is a ““, and it was created by NASA scientist and artist Peter Wasilewski. Rather than painting on canvas like most artists, he creates his images with polarised light and ice.

See a gallery of frizions

To do this, Wasilewski takes a Petri dish of ice in the process of freezing, sandwiches it between two polarising filters and passes white light through. The first filter polarises the light, causing all the rays to vibrate in the same plane. Ice crystals split…

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