Equipment available for borrowing by the MIT community
The Edgerton Center has high-speed video cameras and short-duration strobes capable of capturing events down to microsecond timescales. We can help any MIT student, instructor, or researcher select the right tool for their imaging need, train them in its use, and loan them the equipment so that they can capture the images they need.
High-Speed Video Cameras
The Edgerton center has two high-speed video cameras that we routinely loan out to the MIT community.
The Cameras
This camera can capture 1280 x 720 pixel images at rates up to 700 frames per second, and can record at higher rates with reduced spatial resolution. This monochrome camera's base sensitivity is ISO 6400.
Photron Fastcam Mini AX-200, Color
This camera can capture 1024 x 1024 pixel images at up to 6,400 frames per second. The maximum rate is 900,000 frames per second, with 128 x 16 pixel resolution. The color camera's base sensitivity is ISO 16,000.
Lens, Lights, Tripods, Computers
For each camera we can usually provide you with an appropriate lens and tripod, as well as lights. Each camera comes in a hard-shell shipping case.
For the Photron we provide a laptop to control the camera, but we strongly recommend that you procure an external USB hard drive to store the images. The file sizes tend to be in the range of 1-10 GB, but (depending on the camera) files might be as large as 36 GB.
To control the Edgertronic camera, you will need to provide a laptop with an Ethernet connection that runs the Google Chrome browser. You can download the videos via that connection. Alternatively, you can store videos to an SD memory card that you provide.
Strobe Lights and Triggers
We have a range of strobes with flash durations from less than a microsecond to over a millisecond, as well as trigger units to synchronize the strobe to your experiment.
Strobes
The Edgerton Center has two of these high-output flash units, which have been the workhorses for our bullet photography for the past 15 years. We can provide the appropriate filter for accurate color rendering, as the color temperature of the flash is approximately 10,000 K.
This innovative strobe uses LEDs instead of a high-voltage arc to produce the light. As a result, is is substantially dimmer than a SPOT flash. It has significantly better color rendering and can operate in a multiflash (or multistrobe) mode where it can flash up to six times in a row with the delay between flashes tunable between 10μs and 250μs.
We have multiple GenRad Strobotacs, with flash rates up to 25,000 flashes per minute (~417 Hz) that we loan out to the MIT community.
Triggers
We have multiple StopShot trigger units. In addition to the water drop kit shown, we have optical beam-break triggers, microphones, and vibration sensors that can be used to detect events in your experiment.
We have a Mops Smart+ trigger unit and a capsule 360 panorama photography unit.