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This slow motion Apollo 11 launch footage shot in 1969 still looks absolutely incredible today

This is a video we’ve actually featured before, way back in 2014, but it appears to be making the rounds on social media again and it’s well worth a revisit. It was shot by NASA, obviously, and it’s footage of the Apollo 11 launch, shot on 16mm film at 500 frames per second in 1969. Now, that might not seem like a lot compared to the crazy slow motion cameras available today, but 53 years ago, that was pretty impressive!

When shot at 500 frames per second and played back at 30 frames per second turns that ~30-second real-time clip into an 8-minute and 22-second sequence that you just can’t take your eyes away from. The Saturn V rocket that launched Apollo 11 was an extremely powerful Heavy Lift Vehicle. It was the heaviest rocket ever to ever fly successfully, weighing in at 6.2 million pounds fully loaded.

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Gallium in a blender in slow motion looks like you’re diving into a liquid mirror vortex

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This is a video of which the T-1000 would certainly approve. In fact, at one point, Dan of The Slow Mo Guys actually says that the scene before them “looks like the T-1000 sneezed in a nightclub”. And he’s not wrong! In this video, Gav and Dan put gallium in a blender and use a Bolt motion control robot arm along with the Laowa 24mm f/14 probe lens to record the swirling vortex of liquid metal.

But that’s not all they did. They busted out a bunch of Titan Tube LED lights, and wrapped the blender in a colour wheel of vibrance that produces some pretty amazing psychedelic results. Even with white light, when everything’s spinning around at a few thousand frames per second it looked pretty trippy, but the coloured LEDs really take things to the next level!

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Slow Mo Guys team up with Steve Giralt to film super fast robots in super slow motion

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I wondered how long it’d be before these two did some kind of collaboration and now it’s finally here. We’re big fans of The Slow Mo Guys here at DIYP, who use Phantom cameras to show us events recorded in super slow motion, letting us see new things that our eyes simply aren’t capable of spotting in real-time. As well as the obvious visual appeal, the insights into physics and how things work is just fascinating.

Somebody else we’re big fans of is Steve Giralt. We’ve featured Steve’s work on DIYP a number of times. He also shoots slow motion with Phantom cameras, but he mounts them onto the end of super fast Bolt robot arms for commercial work. Gav from The Slow Mo Guys visited Steve and his team in New York to see how the whole system works and to create some pretty epic slow-motion shots.

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This is what happens when a bullet meets a Newton’s Cradle at 100,000fps

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Gav and Dan are back at it again, and this time they’re firing bullets (and other things) at Newton’s Cradles at 100,000 frames per second. I think we all know how a Newton’s Cradle works. It’s an amusing desktop toy that demonstrates the principle of conservation of momentum. As the first ball drops down from its lifted position, its energy and momentum is passed through the balls in the middle until it hits the end one where it swings up, falls back down and the cycle is repeated.

But what happens when you fire a projectile at it travelling just over the speed of sound? Well, in this video, The Slow Mo Guys find out by firing ball bearings at one using their Malteser launcher and then later fire an actual bullet at one. It’s an intriguing experiment and it’s pretty epic visually, too!

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Giant bubbles popping at 50,000fps looks like a weird gelatinous transparent fabric

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It’s nice to see the band back together and pushing out content regularly again. Gav’s great n’ all, but I’ve missed seeing Dan on The Slow Mo Guys videos and the interactions between them – especially as Dan’s slightly less sane than Gav and willing to take more needless risks for the sake of an entertaining video. There’s not much risk in this video, though, as Dan spends his time living in a bubble. Literally.

Bubbles pop in what appears to be an instant in our real-time eyes. But when you slow it down to 50,000 frames per second, it looks like a weird jelly-like, glossy, transparent, stretchy fabric pulling in on itself and it looks surreal absolutely spectacular!

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Researchers in Scotland develop “affordable” high speed HD camera tech that shoots millions of frames per second

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Researchers at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland have developed a new advanced camera technology that can capture full-colour high definition (1280×720) resolution images at millions of frames per second. Yes, not just a million frames per second, but millions. Plural. The advanced camera tech developed by the team at Heriot-Watt University is set to receive funding to help it commercialise from Scottish Enterprise’s (SE) High Growth Spinout Programme.

The inventor of the technology and associate professor at the Institute of Photonics and Quantum Sciences at Heriot-Watt University, Dr Xu Wang says it “uses a novel architecture and advanced mathematical algorithms to deliver high-resolution images across its full speed range” and that it “has been achieved at a notably lower manufacturing cost than other market products”, like the Phantom line from Vision Research, by being able to use off-the-shelf components.

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Watching tiny capacitors explode at 187,500fps looks like the most dramatic fireworks you ever saw

When I was in electronics class in high school, our teacher made some capacitors explode and it was one of the most amazing things I’d ever seen as an excitable 14-year-old with a great interest in electronics. What really amazed me about it was just how loud some of them were given their pretty tiny size. What didn’t impress me so much was the visual aspect, given that everything was offer in an instant.

But when you film that instant at 187,500 frames per second on the Phantom TMX7510, as The Slow Mo Guys, Gav and Dan, have done in this video, it shows a hidden beauty and power that happens far too quickly for the human eye to see. It’s fascinating to watch these things explode at a teeny tiny fraction of their normal timescale, and we see things that many of us would have never even imagined.

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This is what bugs look like when they get ready to fly at 6,000fps

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I follow quite a few YouTube channels. Some of them are purely for the visually stunning creations they post. Others are for the information they provide. Occasionally, though, you come across a channel that does both. That’s Ant Lab, the channel of Dr Adrian Smith at the Evolutionary Biology & Behavior Research Lab.

Dr Smith’s content focuses primarily on bugs, and we’ve featured him here on DIYP before. A few times, actually. His videos are as fascinating as they are beautiful and this one of various insects preparing for flight and taking off at 6,000fps is no exception.

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This new Micro Four Thirds global shutter sensor shoots 4K at up to 2,000fps

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Well, this is pretty cool. Sensor manufacturer Gpixel has developed a new 4/3″ (22.9mm) CMOS sensor that shoots 4K video at a whopping 2,000 frames per second. With a resolution of 4608 x 2176 pixels, the sensor also features a global shutter, meaning that it captures the entire image field at once – goodbye rolling shutter artifacts!

The sensor is Micro Four Thirds-ish in size, but it’s not quite what we’re used to. MFT consumer sensors are around 18×13.5mm. The Gpixel GSPRING 4510 is a little wider and a little shorter at 20.74×9.9mm. But, for super widescreen stuff, like 2.35:1, it would work out pretty perfectly. That being said, it’s not its intended use.

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This slow-motion video of moths taking off is the most calming thing you’ll see today

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Dr. Adrian Smith of Ant Lab has shown us quite a few times how beautiful, unusual, and complex the world of insects is. His latest video is not only wonderful to watch, but it’s also the most calming thing you’ll see today. Well, unless you suffer from Lepidopterophobia.

Dr. Smith filmed seven gorgeous, colorful moths taking off in slow motion. Setting his camera to 6,000 fps, he has captured the movements in these creatures that we’re hardly aware of.

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