Why do spinning mechanisms (such as helicopter rotor blades) appear to be moving very slowly once they spin fast enough?

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What is the actual physical process happening here?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

In person they just disappear, but on camera they can slow, stop, or even reverse.

Cool 5 year old way to understand if your teenage sibling has a strobe light. Go in a room with a ceiling fan, turn off the lights and turn on the strobe. As you adjust the speed of the strobe, you can make the fan seem to stop, reverse, or go slower or faster. If the strobe fires when the blades are in the same place, your eyes see them as not moving. If they fire when the blades are slightly turned more each time, your eyes see them as turing slowly. The same concept is true with camera that basically take pictures every 24 or 30 or 60th of a second to create the video imagge.

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