Thermal Imaging

Has anyone tried using thermal imaging technology to search for our rather cryptic reptiles ?   Am I right that there would be enough of a termperature difference between a basking lizard and its surroundings to be detectable with good equipment (although I guess its heat shadow wouldn't be as obvious as a homeothermic mammal)

Cheers

Will

Great !  Could this lead to a new kind of reptile photography ??

I live near Wattisham army air corps base I suppose if Ibought a pint for the local CO they might  give a freebee voluntary sweep of the reptile areas round here as practice for Afghanistankeith

Edited by AGILIS

Heh, yeah...its one of those, I wouldn't hold your breath jobs. As Robert says, they are very expensive items, and and those are civilian issue.

It'll need one of the lab guys to be interested enough to lug one outdoors and to point at an adder.

A lot of the night scopes are image intensifiers, that basically provide your eye with more photons than come from the target. Thermal imagers use a different wavelength of light....but....

Most of the modern digital camera sensors are sensitive to near-infrared (but not the lower frequency parts). The near IR element is filtered out, normally by using a glass filter in front of the sensor, as the water in the glass does a decent job of stopping IR.

If you had an old digital camera, and removed the glass filter...you could have an imager that would be more biased towards thermal contrast. It wouldn't give you the full on colour mapping, but hotter things should stand out.

Should be cost effective and simple to modify...just an idea. Probably useless in the field, but cheap enough to test.