Jack Aeby (1923 - 2015)

Jack Aeby

Jack W. Aeby is an American environmental physicist and photographer.

Aeby attended the University of Nebraska and was one of the first civilian employees of the Manhattan Project beginning in 1942. He worked on the project in many areas, starting with human transportation, then he was assigned as the chemical warehouse superintendent.

On July 16, 1945, while at base camp with all the official photographic equipment, Aeby took the only well-exposed color photograph of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon at the Trinity Nuclear Test Site in New Mexico, for which he became famous. The rest of the film was destroyed by the explosion. At the time of the photograph, Aeby was a civilian working in the health physics group with Emilio Segre.

Jack Aeby continued to work at Los Alamos during the Crossroads tests and eventually witnessed nearly 100 nuclear explosions. He then returned to work at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the Department of Health Physics.