Images: See the World from a Cat's Eyes

[Judi Lynn]

By Tia Ghose, Staff Writer | October 16, 2013 09:34am ET

- click for image -

https://img.purch.com/h/1400/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5saXZlc2NpZW5jZS5jb20vaW1hZ2VzL2kvMDAwLzA1Ny85OTcvb3JpZ2luYWwvbmlnaHQtc2lnaHQuanBn

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Masters of darkness
Credit: Nickolay Lamm

Cats are crepuscular, meaning they are active at dawn and dusk, and their eyesight reflects that. They have six to eight times as many cells for viewing objects in low light as humans. That allows them to see much more in settings where humans would be almost completely in the dark. Here, human vision (top) is compared with cat vision (bottom).

More:
https://www.livescience.com/40460-images-cat-versus-human-vision.html?utm_source=notification

[KT2000]

1. well, that's amazing

no wonder my cat roams the house at night.

[cstanleytech]

4. Ours does not roam he runs around like he snorted a premium grade of catnip.

[sandensea]

2. They claim that "their color vision is no match for human vision."

But I just wonder about that.

I'm not much of a cat person; but we had cats when I was a kid, and they always seemed to recognize anything and everything - even at a distance.

[DinahMoeHum]

3. Heh heh. Dawn and dusk are their prime hunting times.

just sayin'

[JayhawkSD]

5. This may be a bit outdated.

And some of it is pure guesswork.

It has recently been determined that cats almost certainly see to a significant degree in the infrared. Something like a human using night vision goggles. That's why they can hunt at night, which many do.

Interestingly, lions don't know to hunt from downwind so that their prey will not smell them. Leopards and tigers do.

Cats and dogs look like similar creatures, but they are so different in so many ways that it's hard to believe that they developed on the same planet.

[cstanleytech]

6. I think its UV that they think they see into not IR.

[JayhawkSD]

7. That too, but the infrared is a newer discovery

Infrared is long wavelength and is what we feel in the form of heat in sunlight. Ultraviolet is short wavelength which we don't feel but which does far more damage in the form of sunburn.

There are actually two types of night vision goggles. One sees objects by means of the ultraviolet light reflected from them by starlight at night. They are a little hampered by cloudy nights, but still work because the ultraviolet light from stars penetrates clouds very easily. (Note that you can get seriously sunburned on a cloudy day, and stars are distant suns.) The other sees objects by seeing the heat that they emit, and are seeing infrared wavelengths.

We've known a long time that cats see in UV, but recent discovery suggests strongly that they also see in infrared. That means their night vision works underground, for instance, or under a heavy forest canopy.