The problem of an incident planar shock interacting with a downstream obstacle is studied here: half‐diamond and semicircular cylinders are chosen for the obstacles. Experimental data is taken from the UTIAS shock tube facility; in particular; infinite‐fringe inteferograms are analyzed which provides full flowfield data. Numerical results are obtained using a new unsplit version of the second‐order Eulerian Godunov scheme for inviscid gas dynamics which is capable of computing on general, body conforming meshes. Detailed comparisons of the two techniques are offered, and excellent agreement is confirmed.