These are gorgeous. Can't go past this without a heads-up for Greg Egan's 2014 short story Seventh Sight, where the protagonists hack their (at the time bleeding-edge tech) eye implants, allowing them to be part of a vanishingly-small group of people that can see into the infrared and ultraviolet.
I think it was in a Daedalus article that I read a passing reference to a technician who had had an operation for cataracts - the synthetic lens then allowed them to see a little way into the ultraviolet and thus they were able to calibrate a spectrometer "by eye" !
Edit: Ok, I looked it up... from the Daedalus column in New Scientist in May 1969:
"... Daedalus recalls the story of a professor of spectroscopy who lost an eye-lens in an explosion. He was given corrective spectacles with enough UV transparency to let him see some way into this region of the spectrum. Accordingly, he could line up the departmental UV spectrometers by eye, and was much in demand!"
Makes me think of Star Trek's Geordie LaForge, a blind engineer whose VISOR[0] not only gave him vision back, it extended it into IR, UV ranges and beyond[1].
(Curiously, for a show from 1990s, the visualization of what he sees[2] is eerily similar to images produced by misconfigured diffusion models.)
--
[0] - Then futuristic; these days, I'm rather confident you could hack it up with VR glasses and enough sensors, leaving only the direct brain interface in the realm of sci-fi. Alas, the necessary suite of real sensors is still stupidly expensive AFAIK, way beyond a budget of a hobby project or even a product prototype.
I remember removing the IR filter from a cheap webcam and seeing everything in a new light (haha, pun intended) was fascinating. One of my black coats that didn't get hot under the sun and appeared more reflective and. I remember some opaque things like Coke being much more translucent.
These winning photos are a bit boring my comparison, the ghostly effect of foliage in IR is cool but a bit overdone when there's so many and there were so many other interesting differences in every day objects.
I'd love to do the same with my mirrorless camera but it's a quite destructive operation.
> I remember some opaque things like Coke being much more translucent.
Many years ago (around 1998 or so) there was a Sony Camcorder which lacked or had the ability to have its IR filter removed. That supposedly gave it the ability to "see through" clothing which caused quite the uproar.
I bought one of those Flir One Pro IR cameras and bought it to a friends party. One thing that we were surprised about was that it could see clear through latex balloons.
> One thing that we were surprised about was that it could see clear through latex balloons.
This was something which surprised me too. Not specifically latex, but how many manufactured materials appear to be transparent in IR.
The explanation I heard is that it is because dye manufacturers usually want to make their product keep their colour long even when exposed to direct sunlight. And the easiest way to achieve that is by selecting materials which are transparent in IR. If they weren't the absorbed IR energy would break them down faster.
So people usually don't care about the IR opaqueness of their pigments/dyes but they care about colour fastness. And that is what selects for IR transparency.
These are gorgeous. Can't go past this without a heads-up for Greg Egan's 2014 short story Seventh Sight, where the protagonists hack their (at the time bleeding-edge tech) eye implants, allowing them to be part of a vanishingly-small group of people that can see into the infrared and ultraviolet.
I think it was in a Daedalus article that I read a passing reference to a technician who had had an operation for cataracts - the synthetic lens then allowed them to see a little way into the ultraviolet and thus they were able to calibrate a spectrometer "by eye" !
Edit: Ok, I looked it up... from the Daedalus column in New Scientist in May 1969:
"... Daedalus recalls the story of a professor of spectroscopy who lost an eye-lens in an explosion. He was given corrective spectacles with enough UV transparency to let him see some way into this region of the spectrum. Accordingly, he could line up the departmental UV spectrometers by eye, and was much in demand!"
Makes me think of Star Trek's Geordie LaForge, a blind engineer whose VISOR[0] not only gave him vision back, it extended it into IR, UV ranges and beyond[1].
(Curiously, for a show from 1990s, the visualization of what he sees[2] is eerily similar to images produced by misconfigured diffusion models.)
--
[0] - Then futuristic; these days, I'm rather confident you could hack it up with VR glasses and enough sensors, leaving only the direct brain interface in the realm of sci-fi. Alas, the necessary suite of real sensors is still stupidly expensive AFAIK, way beyond a budget of a hobby project or even a product prototype.
[1] - https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/VISOR#Capabilities
[2] - There's some screencaps in the MemoryAlpha article I linked; can't link directly, because the site detects hotlinking.
I remember removing the IR filter from a cheap webcam and seeing everything in a new light (haha, pun intended) was fascinating. One of my black coats that didn't get hot under the sun and appeared more reflective and. I remember some opaque things like Coke being much more translucent.
These winning photos are a bit boring my comparison, the ghostly effect of foliage in IR is cool but a bit overdone when there's so many and there were so many other interesting differences in every day objects.
I'd love to do the same with my mirrorless camera but it's a quite destructive operation.
> I remember some opaque things like Coke being much more translucent.
Many years ago (around 1998 or so) there was a Sony Camcorder which lacked or had the ability to have its IR filter removed. That supposedly gave it the ability to "see through" clothing which caused quite the uproar.
I bought one of those Flir One Pro IR cameras and bought it to a friends party. One thing that we were surprised about was that it could see clear through latex balloons.
> One thing that we were surprised about was that it could see clear through latex balloons.
This was something which surprised me too. Not specifically latex, but how many manufactured materials appear to be transparent in IR.
The explanation I heard is that it is because dye manufacturers usually want to make their product keep their colour long even when exposed to direct sunlight. And the easiest way to achieve that is by selecting materials which are transparent in IR. If they weren't the absorbed IR energy would break them down faster.
So people usually don't care about the IR opaqueness of their pigments/dyes but they care about colour fastness. And that is what selects for IR transparency.
I had one those Sony camcorders, it’s night shot was insane. It could see through skin as well revealing vein structure in a lot of detail.
Original article https://kolarivision.com/life-in-another-light-infrared-phot...
https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2025/01/infrared-photograp...
This one is something. What is making the rocks luminous, fungus?
The nature scenes are spectacular.