Would the grain show up in digital pictures as well or only on film? I know why it appears on film but the gnomes that work my cell phone camera won’t give me a straight answer.
Pretty much, but highly dependent on the energy of the ionizing radiation. Lower would come out as a dull grain, higher would show up as bright spots. Neither would look like this post though lol
Not exactly the same, but an electron beam puts a lot of noise in the image: https://youtu.be/Uf4Ux4SlyT4
Also I’ve heard the international space station gets a lot of dead pixels on their cameras from cosmic radiation.
I’m not even sure it would show up on film either. But for CCD cameras (aka phone cameras and basically all modern cameras), 350 americium buttons buttons from a smoke detector in a wide “stew” that far away would produce nowhere near enough ionizing radiation to do that. On top of it, americium-241 is an alpha emitter, meaning that even if alpha particles reached the lens, the lens itself would block a good amount an alpha. This video gives a demo of a CCD without protection over it with americium and other various emitters :)
