How do night vision goggles work?

Morning SEAL Team 6!

You know in those movies where they’re in a pitch black room like this:

And then they whip out the night vision goggles.

And suddenly they can see everything, just in green…

Apparently with some good night vision goggles, you should be able to see a person standing over 600 feet away on a night with no moon and no stars, just a cloudy dark sky.

Sick.

But how do these goggles actually work?

Well, you see normally because photons (AKA little light particles) bounce off of things and into your eye.

Like this:

Night vision goggles work in the exact same way just with WAY less photons.

In fact, the goggles themselves act kinda like magnifying glasses.

But instead of magnifying the size it magnifies the brightness.

Lemme explain it like this:

You’ve got a couple photons coming in through the lens of the goggles.

The lens captures and focuses that light onto something called a photo cathode.

Which somehow, through some fancy science, transforms those photons into electrons!

These electrons then pass through another layer where they go through another fancy sciency process that drastically MULTIPLIES their numbers…

And finally ALL these many, many, electrons pass through ANOTHER layer that turns them back into photons.

And makes them appear green!

The reason they appear green is we just picked that color!

See, for some reason humans can distinguish greens better than any other color making it the number 1 best color to see in the dark!

Stay Cute,
Reece, Henry & Dylan 🌈

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