Filming the Speed of Light at 10 Trillion FPS
Why Hacker News recommends it
Used as the standard reference whenever HN discusses filming light or ultrafast cameras.
What it is
The Slow Mo Guys visit a lab with a camera capable of filming at 10 trillion frames per second, fast enough to see light travel. They show the setup and the resulting footage.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2019 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Cites Twirrim · 2019-05 · on “Video filmed at four trillion frames per second captures light in a flash”
CalTech films light at the speed of 10 trillion frames a second! The "Slow Mo Guys" went to caltech to take a look: [this video]
Cites teleforce · 2022-08 · on “Excel never dies (2021)”
Your story reminds me of this research lab with state-of-the-art 10 Trillion FPS camera. From the video they apparently are still using Windows 7 for the measurement set up [1]. They're publishing in Nature and most probably using Excel for some of their data processing workflow. My former research lab is, however, mainly using Igor Pro software running on Windows. It is waves based professional data processing software tool that has friendly GUI and intuitive table interfaces not unlike Excel but geared towards scientists and engineers [2]. [1]Filming the Speed of Light at 10 Trillion FPS: [this video] [2]IGOR Pro: [LINK]
Cites ranger_danger · 2024-05 · on “Femtosecond lasers create 3D midair plasma displays you can touch (2015)”
You can also use femtosecond lasers and a streak camera to film the speed of light: [this video] Maybe one day something like this can be used to have true light-field cameras without microlens arrays (like Lytro had).
Cites rhdunn · 2025-08 · on “Los Alamos is capturing images of explosions at 7 millionths of a second”
The slow mo guys did a video [1] at 10 trillion FPS. They also recently did another video [2] at 5,000,000 FPS. Their other videos vary between 50,000 FPS and 850,000 FPS. Edit: They mention in [2] that the Phantom camera they have can go to a 95ns exposure up to 1,750,000 FPS. [1] [this video] [2] [LINK]
Cites pbronez · 2025-10 · on “A laser pointer at 2B FPS [video]”
The slowmo guys did a video about a similar setup at CalTech [this video] It’s super cool that AlphaPhoenix is able to get comparable results on his garage. These academic versions use huge lab bench optic setups. They wind up with technically higher quality results, but AlphaPhonix’s video is more compelling.
Cites westurner · 2025-10 · on “Man Builds Two Billion FPS Camera That Records at the Speed of Light”
"Visualizing video at the speed of light — one trillion frames per second" (2011; MIT) [LINK] "Single-shot real-time femtosecond imaging of temporal focusing" (2018) [LINK] "Filming the Speed of Light at 10 Trillion FPS" (2019; The Slow Mo Guys) [this video]