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I took this image from my Lab, a cou­ple of weeks ago. I live close to Mount Etna, the tallest active vol­cano in Europe, about 3,300 m high. Etna is in an almost con­stant state of activ­ity and we are kind of used to those smoke plumes.
Sci­en­tists have been fas­ci­nated by Etna’s erup­tions already long time ago. The first we know about is Empe­do­cles (c. 490–430 BC), a Greek philoso­pher from Agri­gen­tum, a Greek city in Sicily. He’s famous for intro­duc­ing the the­ory of the four Clas­si­cal ele­ments, — fire, air, water, earth. Dio­genes Laer­tius and other Greek and Roman writ­ers report that he per­ished since he let him­self fall into the crater in order to dis­cover Etna’s secrets. We would call him an exper­i­men­tal physicist.
I’m not that curi­ous as Empe­do­cles, so I just did some inves­ti­ga­tion from the doorstep of my lab, using my 200 mm tele­photo lens.

In this post I showed how a mod­i­fied dig­i­tal cam­era for infrared pho­tog­ra­phy can be used as a ther­mal cam­era to imag­ing hot objects and I took, as an exam­ple, some shots of a hot plate turned on. The ther­mal radi­a­tion of an object at about 1000 degree Cel­sius has a tail in the dig­i­tal pho­to­graphic infrared region and, indeed, the hot plate appeared bright.

Well, lava is a pretty hot staff and so I thought it was worth to take a video with my IR mod­i­fied dig­i­tal cam­era using both the vis­i­ble and the infrared fil­ters on the lens. Fur­ther­more, infrared light can pen­e­trate smoke bet­ter than vis­i­ble light (infrared cam­eras are used by fire depts).

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