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[AlphaPhoenix] built a 1,000,000,000 fps video camera to watch light move (www.youtube.com)

submitted 2 days ago by barsoap@lemm.ee to c/technology@lemmy.world

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blurb:

So apparently buying a high speed camera wasn't enough, because after two videos with it I decided to build my own, but 5 orders of magnitude faster…

In this video I'm filming the motion of light as it flies across my garage at… well, the speed of light! It's fast. So fast that even with my best setup so far, I get 18 frames of video from one end of the room to the other, and those frames have a lot of temporal blur so realistically each "frame" is actually kind of an average of the information that by right should belong to 5-10 frames. It's a mess, but it works.

I'm using the technique from the electricity waves video where I used repeated oscilloscope measurements synced after the fact to produce "videos" of electricity moving down a wire. The only difference is that instead of measuring electricity waves, I'm measuring light emitted by a laser, bouncing off the wall, traveling to my camera, and landing in the window of a photomultiplier tube. UNLIKE the electricity waves video, this setup (thankfully) is automated, and an optics assembly slews across angle space, building up a 3d dataset of video, collecting all the time information from each pixel sequentially.

It's a really fun project that I've wanted to do for a long time, and just recently got pulled together.

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[–] Hideakikarate@sh.itjust.works 17 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I remember this being a thing several years ago. The researchers in the video I originally saw used a Coke bottle.

[–] sexual_tomato@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 points 1 day ago

Yes he talks about that in the video. The researchers used $500k+ of equipment. He built a similar thing for under $1k