I thought I'd come across just about every kind of thermal camera out there. From pocketable ones I keep on my keychain to give my phone instant night vision, to a roof mounted setup for my car to drive safely at night, thermal cameras come in all shapes and sizes — but this latest one allowed me to see intriguing stuff in the night sky.
The Mileseey Optics TNV10 Pro is a portable monocular thermal camera, which sets itself apart from all thermal cameras I’ve tested because of its ability to detect targets up to 1,500 yards away. That’s 4,500 feet of range or roughly 0.85 miles, which is a staggering amount of distance to cover.
Even though I initially used it to look at the nocturnal critters roaming around my property, I ended up seeing some really strange stuff in the night sky that I wouldn’t normally see with my own eyes.
Before I get to that, you should know that it works a lot like all the other thermal cameras I’ve tested — which gives me Predator-like vision with the way it discerns heat signatures. Warmer colors like yellow and red indicate hot spots, while cooler temperatures show up in different shades of blue.
Four buttons line the top of the monocular, which lets me turn it on/off, access its menu settings, perform a digital zoom up to 4x zoom, and one that switches between its different thermal settings. You can see the five different modes in the gallery above, which allows me to see airplanes overhead in the night sky much more clearly than my own eyes. Even though videos are recorded at a resolution of 400 x 300 pixels, it’s still way more detailed than other cameras.
Since I’m able to switch between the different thermal modes, certain ones do a much better job of drawing out heat signatures from the environment. Take for example the flock of geese that I could hear in the dead of the night. Without it, there’s no way I could see the triangular shaped formation with my eyes — but the Mileseey Optics TNV10 Pro’s excellent range isolates each goose.
In another clip I recorded, I can clearly make out the triangular formation of the geese. As I’m panning to my left, however, I can see a plane higher up in the atmosphere cruising by. That’s important because the movement of the geese appears slightly chaotic. That makes perfect sense to me, as one geese might be closer or farther away from another. After a few nights of seeing these formations, I felt confident about what I was seeing in the sky late at night.
The clip above was one of the first strange anomalies I captured with the Mileseey Optics TNV10 Pro. This elongated structure was moving very slowly in the sky, going through some clouds in the process. Against the darkness of the sky, the clouds show up somewhat warmer — but this structure was also clearly visible.
Another strange formation occurred on a different night, with this triangular structure appearing soon after a plane flew overhead. What made this formation alarming is that it descended from the sky at a rapid rate, while maintaining its shape way better than the geese flock from before.
And lastly, I caught this fast moving object in the sky that didn’t move like other planes I’ve seen. Not only was the heat signature very tiny and faint, which leads me to suspect it’s either really far away or a small bird, but I was thrown off more by its erratic movement. You can see how it moves very quickly in the sky, but I couldn’t see anything with my own eyes.
I can’t stress enough about how well this thermal camera works for targets that are far away. With other cameras, these heat signatures would either be faint or non-existent — but they come up clear with the Mileseey Optics TNV10 Pro. What’s even better is that it comes with 32GB of internal storage that’s more than plenty, while its battery life has proven to be long lasting. It’s also become one of my favorite accessories to use while I’m shooting astrophotography outside.
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