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Thermal Imaging |
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will
Senior Member Joined: 27 Feb 2007 Location: United Kingdom Status: Offline Points: 1830 |
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Posted: 05 Jun 2008 at 11:12am |
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 |
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Vicar
Senior Member Joined: 02 Sep 2004 Location: United Kingdom Status: Offline Points: 1184 |
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Working temperature for our reptiles is approximately 32¦C (male Vb 31.7û33.8 ¦C).
So, theoretically there should be adequate thermal contrast, providing there is favourable emissivity. If I can arrange to borrow one of the TIs from work, I'll try to get some pics, as we have Adders on site. |
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will
Senior Member Joined: 27 Feb 2007 Location: United Kingdom Status: Offline Points: 1830 |
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Great ! Could this lead to a new kind of reptile photography ??
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Robert V
Senior Member Joined: 06 Aug 2004 Location: United Kingdom Status: Offline Points: 1264 |
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Will yes it could, but I've looked into it. The cheapest hand held (that's any good) as used by fire and rescue people in earth quakes etc if six grand! Yep, six thousand big ones lol! But hey, all is not lost. If you look on ebay under thermal imaging, there's companies that are willing to rent. If that's too expensive for a weekend, I'm sure a load of us on here could club together for a day out thermal spotting grassies under logs! Come on Steve, you're good at organising. Rob |
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RobV
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AGILIS
Senior Member Joined: 27 Feb 2007 Location: United Kingdom Status: Offline Points: 1689 |
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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 |
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LOCAL ICYNICAL CELTIC ECO WARRIOR AND FAILED DRUID
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will
Senior Member Joined: 27 Feb 2007 Location: United Kingdom Status: Offline Points: 1830 |
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Thanks for all your replies - I had no idea of the cost of the equipment - I assumed it would be like night vision stuff, ie coming down in price all the time. Sounds like the equipment is beyond the range of amateurs, but I wonder if professional consultants have used it - either in the UK and Europe or in the States ? Let us know if you do get any results Steve
Cheers Will |
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Vicar
Senior Member Joined: 02 Sep 2004 Location: United Kingdom Status: Offline Points: 1184 |
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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. |
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