A lot of these old film and paper records of nuclear tests are literally rotting away. This is a problem for researchers in the area (who do stuff like designing optimal strategies for first responders to a nuclear attack), because it's the only data we have and it's very unlikely there will ever be any more atmospheric nuclear tests. There's been a big scramble in the last few years to digitize and preserve this data, as well as to declassify as much of it as possible for researchers to use.
Biophysics people use a digital equivalent to this. In in vitro DNA replication experiments, one of the building blocks of DNA is made to be fluorescent so as it is added to the long DNA chain being synthesised you can visually observe it's progress (under a fancy microscope). If you take a 1-pixel slice for each millisecond and stich them together you get a kind of graph of fluorescence extending in length over time. Some incredible insights into DNA replication have been made using this technique.
Minor nit: you may want to ensure your blog software isn’t making “fi” and “fl” into ligatures within your code blocks, because it makes them look funny and can break copy-paste.
Sort of, yeah. It's because of the same kind of limitation: You can't get the whole image at the desired framerate, so you only get a small slice of it over time. You can see the same technique applied in sonars, some kinds of radar etc.
https://str.llnl.gov/october-2017/spriggs
https://www.google.com/search?q=fluorescence+Kymograph&tbm=i...
https://www.123sonography.com/ebook/m-mode-0