How do thermal cameras work?
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Hot enough objects will glow red, and then orange, and then yellow, and then white, etc, but really all objects glow, with what’s called black-body radiation. Objects around room temperature glow in infrared, with wavelengths too long to see, which is why we don’t see objects glow until they get very hot (or if they have some other way of creating light, like through chemical reactions). Just like normal cameras are designed to record visible light, thermal cameras are designed to record infrared light, and then translate it into an image that humans can see and gauge temperature from.
All objects emit infrared light. Hot objects emit more infrared light than cold objects. We can’t see infrared light because our eyes are only designed to see a small range of light frequencies, and the frequency of infrared light is too low for our eyes to detect, just like how we can’t see ultraviolet light or x-rays. However, we can make camera sensors that are tuned to detect infrared light instead of visible light. Since the amount of infrared light being emitted by an object is a very good estimate of that object’s temperature, a camera with an infrared sensor is a thermal camera.
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