Night Vision Goggles

Evening is a bad time of the day for operations, and night vision goggles can give you an advantage. During the hours of darkness, it is hard to see anything without proper lighting. Luckily for people like SWAT, army and the like, night vision technology will make performing throughout evenings easier. This is the domain night vision goggles. They first appeared during the World War II and in the Korean War which were invented and used by the American Army. The Nazis made a version of their own, although theirs was used primarily as tank accessory while the Americans made use of it through their snipers. Newer and improved versions of the night vision goggles did not need infrared illumination source anymore. Instead, it made use of ambient light. These night vision goggles can come in two versions, one that uses image enhancement and one that uses thermal imaging. The image enhancement focuses on light particles that are too minute or low in the color spectrum for humans to pick up. What makes the image enhancement advantageous is that you can easily distinguish your target which is not possible in the thermal imaging. The greenish tint where night vision images show up in is the result of image enhancement. When a target passes through the lens, they get to a phosphor-coated screen that glows through electron activation. The phosphors are deliberately colored green because a human eye can identify shades of green better than any other color shades. Thermal imaging, on the other hand, can detect targets through acquiring its heat signature which shows up as bright colors. Thermal imaging are perfect for finding targets like humans and animals since they have body heat. Inanimate objects like rocks and trees rarely show up.

Night vision goggles are not only popular in real life. Who could forget Sam Fisher? He, in the video game Splinter cell, made these goggles famous. Movies are also fond of using night vision goggles, especially in movies that are about the army and snipers or sometimes for the comical effect. Examples of these movies are Black Hawk Down, Cats and Dogs and Sixteen Candles. Even civilians are interested in using these goggles, which is why there are implemented laws in certain countries prohibiting commercial public use of night vision goggles.