Quote:
Originally Posted by jameegray1
I realise that the finish line is wherever the judges decide it should be. Usually this is within the confines of the strip-camera photo of course. But usually if the judges want to call a dead heat they would use the ruler to show the horses are level?
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I don't think you're understanding how the system works. The judges don't figure out where the finish line is located. The whole photo is the finish line.
If you're old enough, you may remember early Xerox machines in which the light bar was stationary. When you hit the copy button, it actually moved the document over the stationary light bar.
That's the same idea as the photo finish camera. The camera looks at a very thin strip, pointed precisely along the finish line. It takes a picture of this very thin strip, over and over at a high frequency as the horses pass. It constructs a "photo" by laying each of these vertical strips side-by-side. The horizontal axis is time, not distance.
Google "photo-finish camera" and read the wikipedia article, particularly where it discusses strip photography.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_finish
