A DSLR camera was carefully modified to remove the near-IR filter in-front of the CMOS array to permit the camera to detect a wider range of electro-magnetic radiation. This allows the modified camera to detect black body radiation from sources whose temperatures fall in the range of hundreds of degrees. This capability was used to measure the temperature of GaAs wafers in-situ, during growth in a molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) machine. This allowed for better monitoring of non-uniformities of the wafer temperature, a critical metric for ensuring the quality of the lasers during manufacturing.

This work was competed thanks to the literature made available by Jackson and Gossard, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcrysgro.2006.12.020