At the mention of night vision devices, images can come to mind like spy and action movies, soldiers scouring an area with the device at night, helicopters hovering overhead aiding the police in tracking fugitives or detectives using the device to spy on people they were assigned to track.
Night vision devices are actually light enhancing and thermal imaging tools. It makes a particular subject visible by the warmth it emits or observable by using limited light. It enhances a spectral range making the viewer see lights and images that would otherwise have been invisible to the bare human eye. The normal human eye is capable to seeing images that are confined to a certain electromagnetic spectrum that the brain interprets. Night vision devices may use another source of light that enhances images enabling the user to detect objects that improves the detection capacity of the normal eye.
In theory the human eye can see these weaker sources of lights but the brain has a way of filtering out these lights that we are only capable of seeing a very limited number of photons. With the aid of a night vision device, these photons intensified by the photo multiplier tube...