Hello,
This is probably one of the best projects I have ever come across, and I almost have all of the necessary parts to begin my build.  I had one question,

Did you ever consider the technique of "stacking" a number of scans?  Even though the data is not video, it is pixel centric. The technique increases the signal-to-noise ratio and increases the dynamic range , by pixel.  Here, a 'pixel' is a data measure point in temperature, but it is related to a specific area that has been measured, just like a pixel of RGB would be in video.  The technique uses averaging and summing, so that the image can be , say put into a higher resolution , much like in photoshop, you take a low resolution image and convert it from 72dpi to 300dpi, you get much more definition. This works by using a stacking algorithm from the data in one image only, but true stacking lets you create a bitmap of higher resolution, and then fill in the data using from 2 to up to a hundred similar scans run through the stacking algorithm.   The concept is explained below in this astronomy website that covers the technology fairly well:

http://keithwiley.com/astroPhotography/imageStacking.shtml

When I get my system built , I planned on trying it, however I wanted to run it by you to see if it made technical sense in this context.

Thanks so much for what you did.   Hope to hear from you soon.

CharlyV