Flir Thermal Camera Question

[Berni]

Yep we do have radio wave cameras.

A common example of that is phased array radar, pretty common these days on cars. Since most things you want to see with it don't emit any appropriate freqency radio waves (nor does the sun in any reasonable amount) they also integrate an "iluminator" into the same device that shines a focused beam of RF for illuminating the targets. This also has the benefit that the radar receiver can phase lock onto the transmitting RF and get a much improves SNR.

We can't really build a camera the classical way with a lens and detector array in RF because the wavelengths are so long that the camera would be impractically huge. But what a camera essentially does is simply detect light with a very good angular resolution, something that a phased array can do too. The concept can go even lower in frequency in making a "sound camera" using a array of microphones that can precisely determine the direction of sound waves down to sub degree precision, the amplitude can then be mapped to a heatmap to create an image. But obviously don't expect a very high resolution image as the wavelengths are too long to see small objects, weird wave diffraction effects come into play (much like small features turns visible light into a rainbow, messing up your ability to properly see things smaller than 1 micron)

We also have so called radio telescopes. They connected the huge dishes around the world together to create a phased array the size of the earth, giving it a very high angular resolution so that they can actually image something far far away. Tho the dishes aren't actually physically connected, they just are synchronized by GPS and record the radio signal onto hard drives, these then get brought to a supercomputer that combines the signals together.