Happy New Year TFB readers! And welcome to the first Friday Night Lights article of 2024. Here I write about night vision and thermal-related content. Well, today I will share with you my attempt to capture the B2 Spirit Stealth Bomber’s image using long-range thermal and my Sony digital camera.

More Long Range Thermal @ TFB:

• Friday Night Lights: Hacked JIM LR – Thermal Magnifier, See More Farther Away
• Friday Night Lights: FLIR See Spot III (AN/PAS-21) Long Range MWIR Thermal
• Friday Night Lights: Thales Sophie – Cooled LWIR Thermal Biocular

6 Years Ago I Saw The B2 Spirit

For those of you wondering why a B2 Spirit is flying by, this is part of the New Year’s Day Rose Parade and Rose Bowl. Aside from 2023, where they grounded the fleet, the B2 Spirit flies over the parade and the football game. Well on their way to the Rose Parade, the B2 Spirit flies past my parents’ house. The photo above was taken six years ago on Jan 1, 2018. The B2 Spirit was escorted by two F35s.

Six Years Later, Now With More Technology

Well, this year I wanted to try and capture the B2 Spirit and F35s image with my Hacked JIM LR. I would also have my Sony A7SII with a long-range lens to get normal pictures and video of the bomber and its escorts. Here is my setup.

I knew I would have to track a moving object and with the high magnification of the hacked JIMLR, this would be difficult. It helps it has a wide FOV but it is still rather zoomed in. So I would set the JIMLR up like a spotting scope. I bought a long ARCA rail and bolted the JIMLR to it. Then I attached a camera ball mount for my Sony A7SII. I will point the JIMLR at something far and zero the Sony A7SII to the same object.  One minor issue is that the ARCA rail is perpendicular to how my RRS PT-Scout head is oriented. So if I mounted the rail to the PT-Scout, I would not be able to tilt up and down but cant side to side. So I had to order another ARCA rail grabber rail. This actually helped more than I had anticipated. With the added rail (see photo below) I can slide the entire observation setup forwards and backwards for better balance.

On the Sony A7SII, I have a Sigma 600mm mirror lens. Attached to the lens is a cold shoe bolted to the tripod hole and I have an Olympus EE-1 dot sight. The dot sight is designed to attach to your camera’s hot shoe and is for helping to aim high zoom lenses. I zeroed it to the Sony which is zeroed to look at the same thing as the JIMLR.

See the screen in the Sony above? Below is a photo I took of that with the Sony A7SII using the 600mm lens.

See that trail just above and to the right of the water storage. The hacked JIMLR was able to recognize people on the trail. According to Google Maps, that is just over 6k yards or 3.46 miles away.

Here was another test I did. The Cinelease sign is 2.74 miles or 4,822 yards away.

The thermal image is not that sharp because I was taking a photo through the eyepiece with my iPhone.

Flight Of The B2 Spirit

Considering those tests above were miles away, I knew that the B2 would be a little bit closer based on its flight path six years ago. At 8 am it flew by and this year there were no F-35 fighter escorts.

The B2 Spirit flew by faster than I expected. I do not think it was the speed but just the excitement and challenge of trying to track the stealth bomber as it flies using high-zoom lenses.

This is one of the earliest moments I captured the B2 Spirit’s image on my Sony A7SII. These are all screen captures from the video above. Below is the B2 as it flies away and banks towards Pasadena.

While images in the visual range are nice, I really wanted to see the B2 Spirit with the JIMLR. There are not many thermal images of the B2 Spirit. I did find a video that @pepe_le_frawg_69 posted on his Instagram. He used an RH25 to film what looks like an airshow.

I found these screenshots very interesting. The B2 Spirit does not seem to have much heat coming out of its exhaust. You can see a faint wisp in the image above. Now compare that to the F35 below.

According to a commenter on Instagram, the B2 Spirit exhaust is mixed with cooler air from the intake side before it is released over conducting plates to further cool the exhaust down.

Here is a screenshot from my thermal B2 Spirit capture. You can see the flaperons are extended but more importantly, from underneath, you don’t really see the heat of the exhaust.

Lucky for me the B2 Spirit banks as it got further away from me. I zoomed in optically with the JIMLR from WFOV to NFOV. And by luck, I can see the top surface of the B2 based on its flight path. Now I can see the heat from the exhaust.

Final Thoughts On The B2 Spirit Thermal Capture

The JIMLR is low res, it is only 320 resolution but magnifiers really boost its capabilities. I wish I could have adjusted the focus to get a sharper image but I was dealing with a short event at an unknown distance trying to operate two cameras at the same time. It was still fun to try and film the B2 and in hindsight, I am glad the F35s were not there. It allowed me to focus solely on the B2. Trying to film the B2 unclose from far away would mean I would have had to crop out the F35s. Here is a fun little image I made using the silhouette of the b2.