Eli5 : How do night vision glasses/goggles work
In: Technology
Essentially, what they do is take the existing light and amplify it. They have very sensitive receptors on them that can pick up even a little bit of light. They amplify that, which is essentially looking at the areas are lighter or darker what you can see and making the differences bigger, and in the end you have a semblance of vision.
Imagine filming something in a very dark setting. Then, you play back the film on a TV and turn the brightness all the way up to factory maximum. That is essentially what night vision goggles do.
There are two basic types: light amplification and infrared. Infrared (heat energy) is invisible to our vision, but just outside of our vision range. The cameras can pick that up and convert it to a frequency that we can see. This is particularly useful for finding warm-blooded animals (or humans) at night, or machinery, or heat loss from your house, etc.
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