VIDEO: ULTRA HIGH SPEED CAMERAS – HOW DO THEY FILM A TANK SHELL IN FLIGHT?

Ever wondered how they film a tank shell in flight for over 100m like it was travelling at walking speed, or the instant a nuclear bomb explodes?

In the video below you can have a look at the super high-speed cameras that can record at millions of frames per second – that were made well before the modern electronic ones of today – as well as the amazing flight follower systems, and the fastest real-time tracker in the world. 

From the footage, it looks like the camera is panning around the projectile – but that would be impossible because the tank round is travelling at over 1500m per second. If you were one of the people out there who said it was done with mirrors, then you are absolutely correct.

The final footage can be seen with the help of a computer controlling high speed rotating mirrors in a line-of-sight high-speed camera. The speed of the rotation of the mirror matches that of the object being followed, so the faster the object is travelling like a railgun projectile, the faster the mirror would turn to keep up with it. 

Using this method, the object can be kept in the field of view for 100m or so of travel, and about 90 degrees of the movement of the mirrors. In the video, the Tracker2 from specialised-imaging, you can see the mirror and then to the left is the camera. The mirror is computer controlled, so it can be programmed to follow objects that accelerate either linearly or non linearly.