Ramesh Raskar: Imaging at a trillion frames per second

[wolfnowl]

http://www.ted.com/talks/ramesh_raskar_a_camera_that_takes_one_trillion_frames_per_second.html

I still remember when the Nikon F2H was announced, and was amazed that it could burn through film at 10 frames/ second.  That was pretty intense!!

Times change.

Mike.

[Farmer]

Amazing.  9m25s in really blew my mind!

[bill t.]

Ramesh is sort of the new Edgerton, who built cameras with exposure times down to something like 1/1,000,000 second back in the late 40's.  Now we're looking at 1,000,000 times faster than that!

But wow, now I can think of light as an object, rather than some suffusing effect.  That's a really different view from before.  Never imagined it would possible to capture images like that.

FWIW a lot of things inside your computer happen in a time slot where light could travel only a few inches.

Hmmm...I guess everybody knows light travels a foot (300mm) per nanosecond, or a billion feet a second.  If you shoot a picture at 1/4,000 of a second, a stream of light just 250,000 feet, or 47.3 miles long will impact your sensor.  What does this mean?  You'd think it would knock you over, at the very least.

[Fips]

I still remember when the Nikon F2H was announced, and was amazed that it could burn through film at 10 frames/ second.  That was pretty intense!!

Yeah, but the difference is that the Nikon captures 10 consecutive frames of the same events while in the linked clip the event is repeated many times and just photographed at different points in time. Speaking of a trillion fps camera is therefore a bit misleading.
Nevertheless, it is indeed an impressive demonstration.

[Fips]

[...] a stream of light just 250,000 feet, or 47.3 miles long will impact your sensor.  What does this mean?

It's not really a stream. Light comes in photons, i.e. "light particles", which can also be thought of a wave packages. So there's only a stream of light in the same sense in which a river is a stream of individual water molecules.

And while the radiation pressure isn't strong enough to knock you over, it can indeed be used to power spacecraft.

[Ben Rubinstein]

Sigma zoom lens!

[Justan]

Extraordinary. Yet another example of the rate at which scientific discovery has expanded. One would probably need a PhD to understand how the framing system of their camera works to capture light with this fine of resolution.

On another hand, it appears that pointillists such as Seurat were on to something.

Thanks for the post!

[NancyP]

"It's all done with mirrors".
Diagram of camera array originally designed to photo (film) above-ground nuclear explosion. Array was purchased as govt. surplus and camera units replaced with CCDs, circuitry improved (!).

Geekalicious!