Might come in handy for 100,000 frames per second

[M. Valdemar]

http://www.wired.com/images/slideshow/2007/12/gallery_blackhole/marley_camera.jpg

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/multimedia/2007/12/gallery_blackhole?slide=4&slideView=4

[Brian Sweeney]

We had a 1.4MFPS camera at work. It used a hydrogen turbine to rotate a mirror. Fast strobes were used to expose the film. The camera was big.

The FASTAX cameras used high-speed electric motors, but they were 10,000 FPS.

[jan normandale]

Okay Brian, I have to bite... what was the camera for? Nuclear phyics?

[Brian Sweeney]

It was from an old gun range used in the 1950's. Had a 17' concrete backstop. Something called a hypervelocity gun... like 7km/s. The camera was used to record the impacts. The camera was made by "Beckman and Whitley".

[shadowfox]

Yeah, ok. How many megapixels? :D

[mhv]

Given that most films suffer from reciprocity failure around a 1/10,000th of a second, I wonder if special emulsions were developed for these high-speed cameras (you had to expose for at most 1/100,000th of a second). Anybody knows?

[Brian Sweeney]

The camera looked to use fast b&W film- Like Super-XX. i found some film strips from it.

It used extremely bright strobes and a fast lens for the exposure. There was no shutter, just a rotating mirror that was synced with the strobe lights for exposure. The control for them was wall mounted.

[rbsinto]

Similar high-speed rotating mirrored cameras were used to record US atomic and hydrogen bomb tests, especially in the first very tiny fractions (micro?/nano?/pico)? of a second after the birth of the fireball. I remember seeing photos shot through the window of the enclosed structure at the top of the tower, of an A-bom fireball, only a few feet across, and not yet even large enough to envelope and destroy the structure. The fireball at that age looks very much like a grain of spikey pollen.

[crawdiddy]

Let's hope this technology never falls into the hands of the paparazzi.