One Fast Camera

25.

Not a trillion frames per second. If I set my camera at 1/2000 sec exposure, I am not taking 2000 photos per second.

What they're really doing is capturing a 1 ps light pulse, 77 million times/sec on a single scan line with each successive scan line offset slightly to create a raster scan of a single picosecond, and then delaying slightly and repeating the procedure to capture the next frame. Still, pretty impressive keeping the timing that synced together.

If the light is moving at the same rate as the light that the camera is photographing, wouldn't it be impossible to see anything but reflections of light that has already passed? yes? then they just fabricate what they believe to be reality....You'll have to photograph light with something faster than light...or slow the light down...

https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/physics/news/Panda_news/tfkslow_15_03_05.htm

It's fabricated anyway. It's millions of identical, repeated pulses presented as a single pulse, like the stationary wagon wheel in the old western movies. Still, it's pretty impressive.

So it's an artistic interpretation....

"There's nothing in the universe that looks fast to this camera," said Andrea Velten, one of the researchers involved in the project."

Yes, as long as it happens over and over again 'till the miracle camera constructs an approximate to what it would look if it was actually fast enough to capture the movement of light...

As has been mentioned this camera creates video from a succession of images. For a long time we have made detectors for cameras that run at 100 million fps. We have made a few cameras that run at 500 million fps but they only record 12 frames so you need a good trigger finger.

My favorite quote from the article:

<It took about an hour to take enough shots to make a final video representing a fraction of a second of real time, leading one member of the team to dub the equipment "the world's slowest fastest camera".>

And then they had to process the data. They didn't tell us how long the computer processing took.

But the first time you see a reference to this in a movie or TV show, they'll just say, "We were able to find this in footage taken from the security cam from the bank across the street."