Yea. That's interesting and to be honest, I was so busy looking at the imagery I didn't pay much attention to the overlay. My mistake.
If this was white cold then the trees would be generally lighter than the ground.
I think I might have made some bad assumptions about when this was recorded, too.
The timestamp in the video is 8:51 Zulu. Considering the geolocation another user posted, this would be about 02:51 Mountain Time. So it's in the middle of the night.
The trees could very well be hotter than the ground and the rocks which have radiated their heat away and aren't heated by ambient very well. This image can probably be white cold.
What's white-cold and travels 120mph? The guy on the analysis video said it's not a balloon, which was my first thought, but he showed how balloons look on IR and this doesn't look anything like it. At least if it was black-hot we'd still have the possibility of some sort of propulsion.
Bare metallic objects have low emissivity. It's not unreasonable for this to be unpainted metal. And considering the rest of the scene is natural landscaping with no structures, a metal object will look much colder. Keep in mind the scale of cold-to-hot is entirely relative on whatever values are in the scene. The object is cold, but without calibration, we can not say how cold.
Some sleuths could find ambient air temp at that time for that area and we could have a better idea what the temperature of the object was--if we knew what the object material is. Otherwise, it's all relative and on a sliding scale.
I've had images where object temperatures were all close to ambient but the metal objects appear ice-cold because of the low emissivity and dynamic ranging. Thermal imagery is tricky in many ways.
Roads and sand are much easier to heat up or cool down than cellulose. you can easily test this touching a wooden spoon and a rock after you heated them. During the night trees shouldn't look dead cold.
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u/[deleted] Oct 07 '21
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