A black background does wonders to improve the presentation:
That’s ISO 800, 1/10 s, f/8, 30 cm manual focus, with the flash about 20 cm away in the right foreground. The Xenon flash has a 1 µF capacitor giving a pulse width of about 100 µs. The LED visible on the lower right flashed 1 ms after the lump broke the laser beam.
Rather than do science, I shoveled small objects through the aperture…
That was fun…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 