This week I dedicated most of my time to helping Erin with figuring out how to use and implement the thermal camera as well as with setting up a plan with the balloon use. In terms of the thermal imagery, we were able to verify that at ~15m you could spot a squirrel on the camera screen though the actual heat reading appeared fairly inaccurate. Squirrels, like most mammals have a body temperature around 37 degrees C – the the camera however only picked up a heat signature of 20 degrees C. Weather would have been a factor in degreasing the body temperature, but this means that we can’t get an accurate reading to be able to tell differences in species so we will be heavily relying on post processing to determine animals. This leads into the second worry that the current camera cannot give a live feed or any form of video. This means that we need to either look into a different thermal tech or gutting and reworking the current camera we have.