Seeing the Invisible

As humans we only see a small sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum. I am not sure of the evolutionary advantage of this, perhaps too much information would confuse us.Below is a chart showing the known spectrum and what we see.

Just past the visible light region is the Infrared spectrum. Most of the thermal energy radiated by objects near room temperature is in the infrared spectrum. 

Fortunately we can detect infrared and map the heat to colors so that it appears we can see infrared. Economics has brought the price of these cameras down to close to dirt cheap, and now can be found as attachments for you smart phone.

I am a sucker for solutions looking for problems, so I snatched an early release model from Seek Thermal

There of course is an associated app with the camera that does all sorts of interesting stuff.

Here is a picture of an intersection by the big Church down the street. Ok the resolution is not that great, but you can clearly see the outline of a Van and the camera has detected the hottest spot at 194 degrees near the engine. The coolest spot in the image is the street at 48 degrees. Orange is hotter than blue. So you can also see the heat escaping from the windows the church.

Here is the outside of our building with the screen split, left half normal, right half thermal. Again the warmest spot is the windows in the basement.

Here are the thermal footprints on the floor left after walking in my sock feet. Thank goodness Cindy cannot see in the infrared, my visible smudges are bad enough.

So where are we going with all these solutions to non existent problems, not a clue, but it does stir the imagination of the possible.

Thanks for Wikipedia for the first image and some of the wording on the spectrum.