As of today it should be easy to do a relatively cheap rapatronic-like camera with LCD film.
The basic principle is more or less the same: two linearly (?) polarized sheets at 90° that block all the light going through, and a sheet/material in the middle that rotates 90° the light polarization when an electric current is applied. Some of those glass windows that can obscure instantly work with this technology. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid-crystal_display
What I don't know is the speed of polarization rotation for liquid crystals (compared to a Kerr cell) that would define the minimum "obturation" speed available.
See https://www.thorlabs.com/newgrouppage9.cfm?objectgroup_id=81... for examples of modern LCD shutters. They have closing times that are in the hundreds of microseconds, so they are not really replacements for ultra-short exposures. But they are "cheap".
That seems to match with a shutter vendor that says "50 microsecond rise time 1.3 millisecond fall time". So I guess 'rising' is going dark, and 'falling' is going clear.
Or 'rising' means changing the natural state of the crystal (thus rotating 90° the polarization), and 'falling'... well, falling back to the natural resting state. It makes some sense that falling back when unenergized is slower than rising.
Now it'd be interesting to know what happens during rise and fall time. Progressive linear polarization? Waiting time until the crystal reacts?
I'd like to see some more photos of the first moments of a nuclear fireball.
You sometimes see video of a nuclear blast; but the first frames just show a ball of plasma that looks like an opaque white cloud. The light from the blast washes out everything else; there's no sense of scale. Is that 100 feet across, or a mile across? And how long ago was the blast?
Slo-mo video, with a size scale and a clock, would be fascinating. But a sequence of rapatronic stills would be very interesting.
> But a sequence of rapatronic stills would be very interesting.
You have a short sequence of stills in the Wyckoff's footage linked somewhere else here. Rapatronic cameras – Wyckoff explains – where typically mounted in a rack of six, where each captured a single frame.
One interesting tangent to those explosions, is the "double flash" that happens due to the physics of the shell heating rapidly, then obscuring the explosion, then being outrun by the contents.
Even when nations conspire in secret, such explosions can be detected from space.[1]
The basic principle is more or less the same: two linearly (?) polarized sheets at 90° that block all the light going through, and a sheet/material in the middle that rotates 90° the light polarization when an electric current is applied. Some of those glass windows that can obscure instantly work with this technology. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid-crystal_display
What I don't know is the speed of polarization rotation for liquid crystals (compared to a Kerr cell) that would define the minimum "obturation" speed available.