On a number of occasions, I have tried to explain to Big about things like radio waves, radiant heat and so on.
Me: “It is like light but you can’t see it.”
Big (blank, puzzled, Daddy is taking the **** again look): “?”
We have talked about rainbows and splitting light up into different colours, that is fine, you can kind of see that and I think she has caught on to the idea that light can be bent.
Anyway, although I have had wondered about doing some digiscoping with our telescope, I had never considered whether digital cameras were any good at infra red. Well, it turns out that they are, in fact so good that the manufacturers have to go to great lengths to filter it out.
So if you want to prove the point, that there is light (emr) that you can’t see, try pointing a tv remote at a digital camera, or take a photo of the front of a Thinkpad like this one here (sorry, blurry, no tripod, no cable release, must buy myself a Gorillapod).
Not sure if its just me or not but I get nothing when clicking on the digiscoping link, a sham,e ‘cos I have no idea what it is! 😉
(May be me, we are having major bb probs here at the moment.)
Sorry, should work now.
so what you gonna do about the rest of the Electromagnetic spectrum ?:-)
It’s quite a difficult one really, it’s one of those things were really you just have to accept that that’s the way the world is – kids at school much much older can struggle with it .
however, never thought of the digital camera thing, will ahev to have a play.
Dunno, but I think it got across the idea that there might really be something beyond what you can see. I think she has already wondered how the tv remote worked, now she nows it is something ‘like’ light that does it, so it is not such a leap that it might be something ‘like’ light that accounts for the tv signal too. Maybe.
You know, if you’d said it was like light you couldn’t see to me, you’d have got a blank look. Light is not dark, it’s what you see by. (Is it morning, is it light yet?) How can you have light you can’t see? If you’d said it was a colour you can’t make out you might have got further…we’ve already done things around rainbows – prisms breaking up light into different colours (though whether she remembers that) and colours recombining to make white on a little spinny thing, so colours might well have got you further.
Still think your experiment with the camera is rather fun though, I wouldn’t have ever thought of that.
Whereas i’d see talking about colours you can’t see just weird 🙂
SB seemed happy enough when we talked about UV ‘light’ the other day, in the context of vision and how cats see better in the dark, which wandered into things like some insects which can see UV light.
don’t know what she made of it though.
I think the colours explanation makes sense, I wish I had thought of it, we will have to try it. 🙂
In the photo: is that the IrDA port you can see glowing (it’s not clear)? That’s neat-o! Must try it …
That’s brilliant! No.1 son has been asking about light and why things are different colours recently. I’ll show him this little demo later [I used my pocket digital cam and PDA].
There was a documentary on BBC 4/2 last year (I think – might have been the year before) called Light Story. The DVD might be available – I seem to remember it was good and went on about the colours next to the visible spectrum as well as the visible stuff. (Plus some yuck stuff about Newton jabbing his eye with a pencil on purpose. Raving mad.)
Raymond, sounds you have worked it out for yourself, yes, that is the IrDa port.
Just crossed my mind, you could have a lot of fun with an IrDa hat and a CCTV camera.
Also, I am thinking of fitting my car number plates with IrDa. 🙂
Just found this:
How to make a webcam work in infra red