It won’t surprise you to hear why Adobe is ramping things down: the internet has moved on. Shockwave use has “declined” as technologies like HTML5 and WebGL have taken over, the company said. It’s betting that developers would rather move on to newer, truly universal formats if they’re still committed to supporting their web apps.

You might not miss it too much on most websites, but it could still cause problems. Many older web games and media experiences were built around Shockwave, which enabled visually exciting web apps at a time when HTML wasn’t up to snuff and powerful, consumer-friendly smartphones were just pipe dreams. When many of the developers ended support long ago, the death of Shockwave is likely to make those apps unusuable.

The jets shown in the images are T-38s flying at 28,000 feet or so. They were captured by a B200 King Air flying a pattern just 2,000 feet above them, equipped with 1,400 fps cameras mounted on a special arm.

They show the shockwaves, or rapid pressure changes that result when an aircraft flies faster than the speed of sound, about 682 MPH at 30,000 feet. The above image was taken in black and white, but later colorized to show the relative air pressures around the shock waves.

“What’s interesting is, if you look at the rear T-38, you see these shocks kind of interact in a curve,” said research engineer Neal Smith. “This is because the trailing T-38 is flying in the wake of the leading aircraft, so the shocks are going to be shaped differently. This data is really going to help us advance our understanding of how these shocks interact.”

NASA has been able to image single shockwaves for awhile, but really loud sonic booms are produced when multiple shocks merge together. As such, the imaging system is crucial to NASA and Lockheed Martin’s development of the X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology X-plane, or X-59 QueSST. It’s designed to reduce explosive sonic booms — which can cause damage over inhabited areas — to a low rumble.

If such flights become legal over land, they’ll change the face of air travel by reducing many trips by up to half. Several companies are working on quiet supersonic jet designs and one of them, Boom, has even taken deposits from airlines.

Before any overland flights can happen, however, NASA will have to convince the FAA and other regulators that such planes won’t cause damage or frighten inhabitants below. By producing images that dramatically illustrate the data, the new camera system represents a big step toward that goal. “We’re seeing a level of physical detail here that I don’t think anybody has ever seen before,” said NASA senior engineer Dan Banks. “Just looking at the data for the first time, I think things worked out better than we’d imagined. This is a very big step.”