Some of the Awesome Things You Can See with an Infrared Camera
It wasn’t that long ago that it would be completely unrealistic for normal humans to own an infrared camera. I think it was around 2010 that I ordered an IR camera for work — it had a price of around $3000. That’s pretty pricey.
But now, there are a bunch of low price cameras. Most of them connect to your phone and cost under $200 (I’m a big fan of the FLIR One, but Seek Thermal is also nice).
OK, I want to get to the pictures (and videos) but I think we need just a very brief introduction to infrared cameras. Let’s start with light. Light is an electromagnetic wave (meaning there is an oscillating electric and magnetic field — I’ll call them EM waves). These EM waves interact differently depending on the wavelength. With a wavelength between 400 to 700 nanometers (where 1 nm = 10^-9 meters), we call this visible light since you can detect it with your human eye (assuming you are human).
What is Infrared?
For EM waves with a wavelength between 15 micrometers (μm) and 1 millimeter (mm), we call this far infrared — and this is what is detected by an infrared camera. Oh, near infrared is even shorter wavelengths. This is the region of EM spectrum that IR remotes use (but that’s not what we use for thermal images).
