At 5:29:45 July 16, 1945 Los Alamos scientists successfully conducted the world's first nuclear weapons test. The test, which Robert Oppenheimer named Trinity after a line from a poem by John Donne, produced a blast equivalent to 21, 000 tons of TNT. Jack Aeby, a member of the Optics Group headed by Italian physicist Emilio Segre, captured this colour image of the test with a handheld camera. i wasn't a photographer, that wasn't my job, except I did carry a camera ever since high school almost daily and, of course, I couldn't anywhere around Los Alamos, Aeby told the Voices of the Manhattan Project in a 2013 interview. But Segre decided he wanted a photo history of what the group was doing, so he got me appointed official photographer for the group. Aeby died June 19, 2015 at his home in La Mesilla, New Mexico. He was 91. |