Blinded by the Ring LightSamuel DorfmanAward: Top 100
School: wayne hills high school To create the beautiful pattern in this image, I used a diffraction grating over a camera lens pointed at a ring light. The diffraction grating contains thousands of tiny slits, through which the white light diffracts, spreading out and interfering with itself both constructively and destructively. Since the different colors of the visible spectrum have different wavelengths, they constructively interfere, creating maxima, at slightly different places. The inner white circle is similar to the central bright spot in a diffraction pattern. The multi-colored rings closest to the center are the first-order maxima, and each set of rings going out, is the next set of maxima, which explain why they are not as bright. 
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