biteofpythias:

superdoofus-stratodrive:

biteofpythias:

2 military helicopters are circling the hudson outside my building one is circling in a big circle only about 50/80 feet off the water with some sort of large ball thing on the front of the copter - looks like some sort of sonar or radar device. it’s a little freaky b/c they’ve been doing it for about 20 minutes. hopefully some sort of exercise, and it looks like it is water search related - especially with the weird sonar boom looking thing out the front of the chopper. i wish they gave notice of stuff like this…

the thing on the front of the chopper is a gimbal-mount flir (Forward-Looking InfraRed, pronounced “fleer”. a gimbal is the motorized swivelmount the flir detector is connected to. it’s a thermal radiation imaging device. basically “heat-vision”, like the predator has), and if it’s being used over a river they are likely doing a search.

thanks. although it looked quite big compared to what i’m seeing for pictures of this on google image search…

if it’s a HUGE ball it’s probably a multi-spectral array that additionally houses a night-vision ir, standard-optics camera, and if it was indeed military, a laser rangefinder & laser target designation system.