Last summer, we spent a couple of days wandering around London with an infrared camera. This video is the result: a tour of the city in light that you can’t see with your own eyes.
Near-infrared light is just beyond the red end of the rainbow. If you’re talking wavelengths, which is how we can quantify the colour of light, blue is around 400 nm (nanometres, so billionths of a metre), green is 550 nm, red is around 700…and the near infrared starts where red stops, with the stuff in this video being mainly wavelengths from about 720 to 800 nm or so.
This might not sound like a big difference, but it transforms the world around us. Plants and trees glow white, blue skies turn incredibly dark, and there are plenty of other surprises too. Watch the video to see for yourself!