Watch the Arc

Welding visualization system uses intense pulsed lighting to outshine electric arc, laser cutter
Applied Science

Pretty cool. Pretty cool price, too:

Kron Technologies Helios Welding Visualization System $10,000

Time

This watch vibrates 1,296,000 times per hour
The Slow Mo Guys

This morning I'm watching the Slow Mo Guys and while they are entertaining I am wondering more about the cameras and how they synchronize them with the action. I mean, when you are trying to capture something that only takes a fraction of a second and your camera is recording a zillion frames a second, you want to be Johnny-on-the-spot when the bomb goes bang. High speed memory is expensive and you can only fit so much of that memory in the camera.

Trying to find 200 frames of explosion amongst 1.6 million black frames

The line on this image gives you idea of the problem. Anyway, I want to know more, so I go to YouTube page and I don't see anything about what I want, but I do find this cool video of an Accutron Watch (see above). 

Dragonflies hunt by predicting the future

Dragonflies hunt by predicting the future
AlphaPhoenix

This video is great, best thing I've seen in a while.

Cool Water

How small does water get?
The Slow Mo Guys

APFSDS

Tracker 2 - APFSDS Failure - Specialised Imaging
SpecialisedImagingUK
High speed photography fascinates me. The camera used here is from Phantom. 

APFSDS stands for armour-piercing fin-stabilized discarding sabot.

When The Bullet Hits The Card

Golden earring - Twilight zone
Thijs Pietersen
I rockin' out to an old YouTube playlist, playing four kinds of solitaire and this tune comes on. This thing is old: 1982. That's almost as old as my new house. That's a couple of years after I got out of school. That's when I met my wife.

The video is pretty good, it's got all the elements of a James Bond movie. "The music video was one of the first to feature a cinematic storyline and dance choreography and was a hit on the fledgling MTV network, helping the song to become the second international hit for the band." - Wikipedia

In 1958 Photo-Sonics designs 35mm-4B high speed rotary prism camera for atomic tests in the South Pacific. This camera remains today the world’s fastest 35mm rotary prism camera (3200 pictures per second). 

Just after the four minute mark, they show a playing card being cut in half by a bullet. The scene only lasts for a second. If a card is 3 inches wide, then the frame is about 10 inches wide, call it a foot. If the bullet is traveling at 1,000 feet per second, we can guesstimate that the bullet took one millisecond to cross the frame. If the video is running at 24 frames per second, then the camera that recorded this scene was running at 24,000 frames per second. Pretty good for 1982. Wikipedia's article about High Speed Photography is a little week on the history of these cameras, but the a rotary prism camera recording on 16mm film could have done the job. Photo-Sonics history page is better.

Google has the lyrics.

Supersonic

Shockwaves from two T-38 aircraft flying supersonic - NASA

This photo was taken from a Beechcraft King Air that was flying above the T-38's. Since the T-38's were traveling like three times as fast as the Beech, timing was critical.

NASA Beechcraft King Air flying over the giant compass rose at Edwards Air Force Base in California

They did this before using ground based cameras shooting at the sun, which provided a nice collimated light source.


NASA Supersonic Flights Validate Flightworthiness for Future Schlieren Imaging
How they got the most recent image while looking at the ground is a mystery.

Rocket Cam

How did NASA Film the Apollo and Space Shuttle Launches?
Previous posts about extreme video

• Packard Bell 920 TV Camera
• ARGUS-IS
• Electromagnetic Railgun world record setting event
• Kodak Goes Digital
• LADEE, Part 2
• The Range Goes Green
• Felix, Igor & Clyde
• Blast From The Past
• Rail Gun, Part II
• Freefall MOAB 

And a WW2 German film maker with a really big camera.

Filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl

Bullet Cam

Vortex\Hornady Bullet-Cam
You knew it had to be coming. Via Tam.

Rail Gun, Part II

Railgun Update from General Atomics
Did he really say Mach 5? That's like 3,000 miles per hour. So this thing must be producing a heck of a sonic boom. I wonder how far away you can hear it, and I wonder if that distance depends on the size of the projectile.

Once again the camera technology used to capture the sabot in flight is probably more involved than the gun itself. According to Google's Calculator, Mach 5 equals 3,800 mph. I counted ten seconds of the thing in flight before it hit the plate. That works out to around 5,000 frames per second. I imagine it's all digital now, but that's still impressive.

 To record 10 seconds of real time flight you would record enough frames to make a full length feature movie. 3,800 mph is like one mile a second, and projectile only traveled seven miles, so the flight didn't even last ten seconds, so to make a feature length film we would have to pad it with some filler. I wonder how much of a crater it made when it finally hit the ground. 

Notice how the spokesman pronounces sabot "sabo", which is probably correct, because the word is probably French and the French are always forgetting to pronounce the ends of words. I probably mispronounce it because, well, I'm like that.

Part I 

From Tactical World.

Update February 2017 replaced video with one that works.

Electromagnetic Railgun world record setting event

This happened this month.



Note the time shown along the bottom edge of the video. Looks to me like it is counting ten-thousandths of a second, i.e. the camera is taking 10,000 frames a second. In part of the video they are tracking the projectile as it is flying along. I wonder how they did that. Was the camera actual tracking the projectile, or did they just use a wide angle view and crop it down so it looks they were tracking it? Our military must have some of the fastest cameras in the world. For another example check out the picture of the howitzer firing.

I am impressed. I am not quite sure just how fast they got the bullet going, but Mach 5 is one of the numbers I read. The Navy's goal is to make a real gun like this that they can install on ships. They are hoping for a range of 200 miles, compare to the 13 mile range they have with their current five inch conventional gun.

The railgun projectile would follow a sub-orbital trajectory. The high velocity at impact would negate any need for an explosive warhead.

Update February 2017 replaced missing image.

Update February 2022 replaced missing video. The top link seems to be dead, but it might just be a temporary problem.

Slow Mo

SprintCam v3 NAB 2009 showreel from David Coiffier on Vimeo.

Mostly 1000FPS shots, made during a recent rubgy competition in the Stade de France, Paris.

Found on Neatorama.

Update April 2019 replaced outdated embed code.