Reddit mentions of An Album of Fluid Motion

I have a book that I got as a gift that most aero folks should love (I'm an aero guy too). It's called "An album of fluid motion" by Van Dyke. Amason has a paperback version. http://www.amazon.com/Album-Fluid-Motion-Milton-Dyke/dp/0915760029

For anyone interested in finding about more about this type of stuff, I am reminded me of these super old videos of fluid motion, and I can't recommend the entire series highly enough.

There are also the books An album of fluid motion and A gallery of fluid motion which have a ton of cool pictures.

There seems to be a lot of confusion here about exactly what is required for doing Schlieren photography, so I'm going to copy and paste one of my comments from below for everyone's reference:

The quality and size of the mirror will only start to matter when you're doing real research. For example, what I'm doing requires me to resolve much smaller fluctuation in index of refraction than what you would get from "standard" optical equipment. This does not, by any means, mean that you can't observe Schlieren effects with cheaper mirrors and lenses. For simple demonstration/proof of concept purposes, you can get away with almost any optical grade.

For example, this is an image of shock diamonds formed outside of a compressible jet that I did as a demonstration for my lab:

http://i.imgur.com/yfWByA0.jpg

This was done with two very cheap 2" plano-convex lenses purchased from Thorlabs (http://thorlabs.us/) and 1 very cheap 55 mm lens attached to a very cheap $300 camera. As you can see, the physical phenomenon is easily observed using rather low grade equipment.

I would highly recommend that anyone who is interested in Schlieren photography to go out and experiment with it. It is a lot of fun. You can observe some very cool physics with just a couple of hundred bucks for the setup. One other thing to keep in mind is that you can do Schlieren with off-axis parabolic mirrors OR lenses. I HIGHLY recommend that you start with lenses before moving to mirrors. They are significantly easier to align and setup than your typical "z-type" Schlieren mirror systems. Purchase yourself 2 lenses and an optical rail (you can find all of it on Thorlabs), and you will be able to setup your system quite easily. I don't have time to go through all the technical details, but you should read about different Schlieren methods online and learn how they work.

If you would like to see some amazing examples of Schlieren and Shadowgraph images, I HIGHLY recommend Van Dyke's book on Album of Fluid Motion (http://amzn.com/0915760029).

Not exactly PDE focued, but I have this as a coffee table book:
An Album of Fluid Flow

Less math and more pictures of fluid flow demonstrations. Still pretty though.