A YouTube creator working out of his garage has engineered something that is normally found only in major research facilities: a camera capable of filming a laser beam moving at the speed of light.

Rather than announcing his technical achievement in an academic journal or press release, materials scientist Brian Haidet published his creation publicly on his YouTube channel AlphaPhoenix. Historically, “light-in-flight” demonstrations were almost exclusively conducted in specialized laboratories, including the one-trillion-frames-per-second experiment conducted at MIT in 2011.

In that experiment, capturing light in motion required streak cameras and femtosecond lasers within a controlled laboratory setting. The results were then presented to the public through an MIT News article and press materials, which framed the technology as “an imaging system that makes light look slow.”

The public-facing release, of course, did not reveal the trial-and-error that went into building the system. In contrast, Haidet’s recent work in his garage sits at the opposite end of that spectrum. He captures the speed of light in a way that conceptually approximates the MIT results using off-the-shelf parts and open-source tools in his garage.