High Speed Night Photography

[philsalesses]

I'm brand new here but I couldn't find a better place on the net to ask this question. I'm working for a new startup that's taking thermal images of houses at night to classify energy leaks (just like Google Street View). But now we want to add an optical camera to take photos at night so we can make panoramas.

Our situation is this: We drive our cars between 10-20mph at night in a city and would need to be able to read street signs without illumination (so we can find out where the thermal cameras are taking photos if our GPS goes out).

I use to have a 5d mkii (before I sold it to make rent as a grad student) but the 24-105mm lens I had on it wasn't nearly enough to take clear photos out of a car window at 6400ISO. Noise isn't a huge issue, we just need to be able to read a street sign.

Hopefully some kind soul can help point me in the right direction. We're looking for some good solutions to test out, but also where we can get these cameras to test them. We don't have $10,000 to buy and return cameras.

I was thinking I'd maybe want to try a D7000 with a 35mm 1.8f (also maybe with a Sigma 30mm 1.4f). Also a D800 with a 28mm f2 or on the low end a D3200. I could also try a 5d mkiii but not sure which lens would be best.

How should we start attacking this problem? Should I post somewhere on the net asking people to post photos in our requested environment? We'd need settings for the photos (ISO, lens, model).

Ideas?