Filming the Speed of Light at 10 Trillion FPS
The Slow Mo Guys0 HN recommenders · 2019–2025
42.1M views · demo · evergreen · Uploaded 2019-03-27
The Slow Mo Guys visit a lab with a camera capable of filming at 10 trillion frames per second, fast enough to see light travel. They show the setup and the resulting footage.
Used as the standard reference whenever HN discusses filming light or ultrafast cameras.
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6 comments from Hacker News
CalTech films light at the speed of 10 trillion frames a second! The "Slow Mo Guys" went to caltech to take a look: [VIDEO]
Your story reminds me of this research lab with state-of-the-art 10 Trillion FPS camera. From the video they apparently are still using Windows 7 for the measurement set up [1]. They're publishing in Nature and most probably using Excel for some of their data processing workflow. My former research lab is, however, mainly using Igor Pro software running on Windows. It is waves based professional data processing software tool that has friendly GUI and intuitive table interfaces not unlike Excel but geared towards scientists and engineers [2]. [1]Filming the Speed of Light at 10 Trillion FPS: [VIDEO] [2]IGOR Pro: [LINK]
You can also use femtosecond lasers and a streak camera to film the speed of light: [VIDEO] Maybe one day something like this can be used to have true light-field cameras without microlens arrays (like Lytro had).
The slow mo guys did a video [1] at 10 trillion FPS. They also recently did another video [2] at 5,000,000 FPS. Their other videos vary between 50,000 FPS and 850,000 FPS. Edit: They mention in [2] that the Phantom camera they have can go to a 95ns exposure up to 1,750,000 FPS. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]
The slowmo guys did a video about a similar setup at CalTech [VIDEO] It’s super cool that AlphaPhoenix is able to get comparable results on his garage. These academic versions use huge lab bench optic setups. They wind up with technically higher quality results, but AlphaPhonix’s video is more compelling.
"Visualizing video at the speed of light — one trillion frames per second" (2011; MIT) [LINK] "Single-shot real-time femtosecond imaging of temporal focusing" (2018) [LINK] "Filming the Speed of Light at 10 Trillion FPS" (2019; The Slow Mo Guys) [VIDEO]