– Why does everything appear green through night vision means?
In: Technology
Night vision goggles can only make a monochromatic (one-color) image. Green is used because the human eye is better at picking out small differences in green than in any other color.
Depending on your night vision system, it doesn’t.
Night vision goggles that use light amplification take the very low levels of light present and amplify them to be visible light. Limiting the detection system to specific colors (as you’d need to do in order to have a color image) significantly reduces the amount of light it can collect. As such, these NVG’s see in black and white. Then, they display that image for the user, typically in greenscale because our eyes are the most sensitive to green colors.
Real night vision goggles are effectively a very good low light camera attached to a small screen in the goggles. Early night vision systems used monochrome CRT displays, and green is a common color for CRT displays. Also, the human eye happens to be very good at picking out the color green, while we are less good at red, and worst at blue.
I newer night vision systems can provide the image in whatever color you want, or perhaps even full color. But it has entered the popular imagination that night vision is green, so this is always the color that is used in TV shows and movies.
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