Popular Science has starting instruction on their How 2.0 Blog for building your own X-Ray vision camera. They are quick to point out one of the potential issues with building the camera:
You’ve seen them in the back of magazines–heck, probably Popular Science–all your life: the crazy swirling paper X-ray specs, with the campy ’50s pervert looking at the bloomers of a shocked gal. While we don’t support such nefarious uses, you can make your own working X-ray camera, just by modifying a CVS Disposable. It won’t give you Superman vision, but you should be able to see through one or two layers of paper and fabric (again, behave!) in the right light. Here’s the catch: The key is in a hard-to-find X-ray conversion material called a beryllium window. PopSci got its sample from NASA during a visit to the Goddard Space Flight Center a few years ago, as it is sometimes used in satellites to block out cosmic X rays that might distort digital communications.
So if you don’t have friends at Goddard, you might want to start looking now for another source of a beryllium window (a quick search of ebay turned up zero, so don’t think it’s that easy). Still, I think the results show this to be worth trying to get and build anyway.
[tags]Build your own X-Ray vision camera, PopSci X-ray camera instructions[/tags]