Thermal video of Concordia shipwreck

Poignant images from the Concordia shipwreck have been released taken with what I assume to a thermal camera mounted on a helicopter. They are described as 'night vision' but I think they are thermal (or composite), with a black and white palette that makes white cold and black warm. You can see the black (warm) passengers and crew making their way down the side of the cold (white) hull.

As you might imagine, the wreck of the Titanic a century ago triggered research into remote detection of icebergs, notably a bolometer with which the horizon can be scanned. Since the bolometer only needs to scan a single defined line it is practical to try and use such a device: a bolometer only detects temperature remotely at a single point. Unfortunately it didn't seem to work, presumably because icebergs are at pretty well the same temperature as the sea and so wouldn't show up with the kind of bolometers available a hundred years ago.

As late as 1934 the American liner Manhattan was fitted with a fog camera, which automatically took an infrared photograph ahead every 50 seconds and then developed and printed it. The hope being that this system would give an early warning of obstacles in haze and fog. The liner's captain reported that the system had indeed been useful in a blizzard and in fog but remarked that it could not be used at night until "ships, lighthouses, and buoys are equipped with infra-red beams". But it was already clear that infrared photography would not penetrate fog and a Times special correspondent, explaining how what could be photographed was dependent on particle size, commented that the Manhattan voyage had "not been suitably foggy for a real test to be made".

Modern thermal imaging cameras are very capable of distinguishing between sea and either objects floating or surface obstructions and the video gives some indication of this. Note that the exposed parts of the ship seem colder (lighter) than the surface of the sea.

American Astronomical Society Austin sees new infrared images

The BBC web site has a small slide show of some far infrared images from space telescopes (such as WISE, Herschel and Spitzer) that were released at the 219th American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas, which ends today (12th Jan).

More on AVOID remote ash cloud detection

I wrote over a year ago about the AVOID passive-infrared system to remotely detect volcanic ash clouds from aircraft. The system is now being trialled by EasyJet with test flight around Mount Etna in Sicily and the BBC web site has a short film about it.

Two chances to meet Simon Marsden

I guess you're familiar with Simon Marsden's atmospheric (if not downright spooky) infrared photographs of ruins and the like. I've recently mentioned his new book on vampires and there are two chances to get a signed copy and meet the man coming up before the New Year.

The first is at the Walcot Gate, off Walcot Street, Bath, Somerset between Tuesday 29th November and Saturday 3rd December 2011 (11am - 5pm). Like the book, the exhibition is called Vampires - The Twilight World and Simon will be on hand throughout the run to answer questions and sign copies.

A little more formal is a talk called Christmas Spirits, at Stubton Hall, near Newark, Nottinghamshire on Saturday 10th December 2011 from 6.30 pm to midnight. It says here ...

Come and listen to internationally famous photographer, author and ghost hunter Sir Simon Marsden talk about his upbringing in haunted houses that so influenced his career. Illustrated with photographic slides he goes on to describe how he created his singular style and the techniques he uses. But most of all share some of the extraordinary adventures he has experienced when travelling in the UK and in foreign lands in search of the undead, which have sometimes been truly frightening.

Here's hoping his stock of infrared film holds up.

Long-lasting near-infrared emitter

Via various web sites I've been led to a paper published in Nature Materials [abstract].

Zhengwei Pan, associate professor of physics and engineering at the University of Georgia, Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, and his team have developed a material which will fluoresce in a narrow band around 700nm when excited by any visible wavelength including fluorescent lighting. OK, we all know that 700nm is the boundary between red and near-infrared but the eye's sensitivity to that wavelength is so low that we will usually refer to this as near-infrared. You can see the excitation and emission spectra in the Nature abstract.

What is exciting about this work is that, after a short excitation, the material will continue to emit for a long time ... 'seconds to minutes' will result in more than 360 hours output according to the paper. The material can be fabricated into nano-particles which could bind to cancer cells, enabling visual location of small cancers in the body, it can be made into ceramic discs or even paint in order to provide illumination visible only to people using near-IR sensitive devices. I can see an application to detect whether something has been exposed to light recently.

Apparently the starting point is the trivalent chromium ion, a well-known IR emitter when its electrons return to their ground state after excitation by visible light. Usually the effect lasts only a few milliseconds but this new material embeds the chromium in such a way that the emitted light is trapped and releases the energy more slowly. [More info at EurekaAlert for those of us without a Nature subscription.]

This photo shows Zhengwei Pan (left) and postdoctoral researcher Feng Liu in a darkened room, using only their infrared-emitting ceramic discs as a source of illumination. The phosphorescent material was also mixed into the paint that was used to create the University of Georgia logo behind them. You can just see the 'five-o'clock-shadow' on their faces, a result of near-infrared skin penetration. [Credit: Zhengwei Pan/UGA]