Potato Canon at Night
Every January, my sons’ Boy Scout troop goes cabin camping on the (frozen) lake at our Council’s camp. I posted about our ice fishing experiences back in January. I forgot that I had taken some video of another favorite activity at the Cabin Camp – potato canons! Also called Spud Guns, Spudzookas, and potato launchers – checkout this article on How Stuff Works for more details on how to build them and some theory of operation.
These canons can shoot a full size potato 100s of feet – we fire them out on to the frozen lake. This year, we shot a few at night and I caught them on video on my little Pentax W60 camera at 30fps. There was literally no light so the video (and photos) are grainy but the effect is interesting and capturing the blast in the canon was VERY interesting. Here is the sequence of 4 frames right at the time of launch:
(you can see the full size photos here)
In this sequence you can clearly see the initial ignition, then the blast up the barrel, and finally, the blast expelling the potato out of the canon. Keep in mind that the canon is made of thick, white PVC pipe! Since the camera shoots 30 frames/second and the blast occurs over 2-3 frames, the entire event is taking about 1/10 of a second!
Here is the video from which these stills were captured: