Night vision technology enables you to see objects clearly at night at distances of up to several hundred yards in the absence of any artificial light. People, buildings, vehicles and details of the landscape viewed through a modern night vision system appear almost as if illuminated while the same objects viewed with a naked eye would appear only as indistinct shadows (or won't be visible at all).
In order to understand how any night vision devise works compare it to a video camera but a very special one, with an extremely high sensitivity to light. All night vision systems provide the viewer with electronically enhanced viewing. When you use a night vision scope, you are not actually viewing the scene before you, but instead you are viewing a video image of that scene. The heart of any night vision system is an image intensifier tube. More...