[strela]

An interesting article - thanks for pinging me to it.

Researchers managed to get negatives of amber chamber items. The problem was that the images were black-and-white. It was quite a problem to restore the color spectrum of the solar stone of which the amber chamber was made judging by the negatives. The researchers suggested a brilliant solution: they made up a scale of different amber shades and made a black-and-white picture of the scale. During the reconstruction works the scale of amber shades was compared with the negatives of amber chamber exhibits so that reconstructed items agreed the originals by color.

Brilliant indeed. Pound for pound, as proven in their space program and just in everyday life, Russians routinely prove themselves to be the best practical engineers on the planet. They seem to have something that the pioneers of the American West had, and something sadly that we seem to have lost.

[OldFriend]

You can praise Russians, but is it necessary to demean Americans?

[gcruse]

Brilliant indeed. Pound for pound, as proven in their space program and just in everyday life, Russians routinely prove themselves to be the best practical engineers on the planet.

Not all that brilliant.  A densitometry reading of black and white amber colors
should yield up something like a color guide.  

This is brilliance:::

At one time, black and white cameras were lofted on rockets
from the Alabama Rocket Center or whatever it was called.
The cameras took pictures of the stars above the atmosphere
or however high they went, then the camera was parachuted from
the rocket, retrieved, and the film developed.

On one mission, they recovered the film and developed it only
to find the camera F-stop setting had been set way too high,
that is, the aperture was too small, and the black and white
negatives severely underexposed.  Useless.  So they gave the film
to an engineering student at Alabama and told her anything she
could do would be appreciated, but the mission was written off.

After some contemplation, the student had the film irradiated to
make is slightly radioactive, then made contact prints from the
negatives using only the radioactive silver molecules as source
of exposure.  It worked, the mission was saved.  Now that's
brilliance!