It is impossible to directly record light at that speed, so the camera takes millions of repeated scans to recreate each image. The process is called femto-photography. "There's nothing in the universe that looks fast to this camera," said Andrea Velten, one of the researchers involved in the project.
The technique was created by scanning one, thin horizontal line at a time by using an adapted streak tube. One image is equivalent to a single scan line, and hundreds of images had to be taken to create one frame. The scientists did this by repeating each shot, angling the camera's view with mirrors to record a different scan line of the object every time.
This camera has revealed new ways of seeing the world and it can also be used to analyze faults and material properties, scientific imaging for understanding ultra-fast processes and medical imaging to reconstruct sub-surface elements—ultrasound with light!
The camera can even capture the scattering of light below the surface of solid objects!
