A somewhat different picture of the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility. Appropriately enough this image of an IR telescope was taken with an IR camera by Mark Devenot, a fellow engineer and photographer in the Keck Operations Department.
Since this is a thermal infrared image, the colors map directly to temperature. In this image the warm asphalt of the road glows bright yellow and the cold patches of snow a cool aqua. Note how well the telescope building and dome are designed, emitting very little infrared, a good feature for an infrared telescope.
The IR camera in question is fairly low resolution, a mere 256×256 pixels, fairly typical in handheld IR cameras. Mark found a way to make an impressive image even with the low pixel count by using some of the artistic filters in Photoshop to process the image. I saw the image and had to share it with my DarkerView readers…