The Titan Arum plant blooms about once a decade. A recent blooming event occurred at the Conservatory in the Geelong Botanic Garden. As the plant blooms, it warms up significantly. This was tracked using our Infiray M600 professional thermal camera, connected to a PC over a USB connection. The camera was running 24/7, over 5 days straight, feeding the thermal image to a PC running companion software. The real-time thermal image from the software was then overlaid over the video livestream picture-in-picture style, helping people to track the blooming progress of the plant during this rare event!
The thermal camera clearly showed how each day prior to blooming, the plant would warm up during the daylight hours, before then cooling down slightly at night. Each day the flower reached a higher peak temperature, until the flower started opening at around 9am on Monday 11th November.
You can view the livestream here, and more info can be found at Geelong Australia and Visit Geelong. Congratulations to Total Events Geelong for handling the event logistics flawlessly.
This event was also featured in national and global press:
Image from livestream with picture-in-picture thermal view
Photo showing Infiray M600 thermal camera viewing corpse flower Titan Arum
Just for fun, I decided to come and see the plant for myself –and brought along my other Flir E8 thermal camera. However, by the time I arrived (around 21 hours after blooming started) the plant had already cooled down significantly, and there was practically no odour. You could say I was dead disappointed! Oh well — I guess I’ll just wait for the next 10 years….
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