Due to popular demand in a range of applications, the Kestrel 4000 is available in Gray, Olive Drab, and Safety Orange.
Available in the NV
Configuration
Military personnel and pilots flying in darkness
are often concerned with preserving their night vision. Due to overwhelming demand from our military customers,
the Kestrel NV line was added in 2005.
The Kestrel 4000NV is available with an Olive
Drab case or a Desert
Tan case. The unit has a night-vision preserving
backlight which helps users to sustain natural night vision. The
NV's backlight incorporates an optical filter to reduce overall
brightness and minimize blue and green spectrum light to preserve
night vision. Additionally, NV backlights are also much dimmer
than a standard backlight, making it more difficult to detect with
the naked eye in night operations. This backlight appears soft
greyish pink, not red, and is still in the visible spectrum, so
is not compatible with night-vision equipment.
It
takes 30 to 45 minutes for the average eye to adapt to darkness and
maximize night vision. Even a short burst of white, yellow, green or
blue light “bleaches out” the rod cell photoreceptors in the eye and
causes night blindness until the entire adaptation process can take
place again. Light in the red spectrum does not cause this “bleaching
out”, preventing night blindness and night vision fatigue.
