Human is looking

These are the real colours

This is your own eyes looking at the garden. You have 3 kinds of colour cell, and a screen is built to match them, so this picture can be right.

where this came fromDartnall, Bowmaker & Mollon (1983) Proc R Soc Lond B 220:115-130, microspectrophotometry of seven human retinas: "red cones, 558.4 +/- 5.2 nm (n = 58); green cones, 530.8 +/- 3.5 nm (n = 45); and blue cones 419.0 +/- 3.6 nm (n = 5)". Note these are NOT the 420/534/564 usually quoted from memory.

What to look at

Look at the red flowers on the big bush, and the blue ones on the small bush.

How much detail it can see

It can tell apart about 56 stripes squeezed into one degree of sky. That is your own eyes, so this is as sharp as the picture gets. This was worked out by counting the cells in its eye, not by asking it. Your screen has run out of dots before this animal has run out of sight, so it cannot show you everything this one can see.

This picture shows a piece of the world 56 degrees wide, which is about 6 fists held up side by side at arm's length. That is how the blur is worked out, so it is worth knowing.

where this came fromWilliams (1985) Vision Research 25:195-205: "the minimum foveal cone spacing is about 0.62 min of arc, yielding a Nyquist limit of 56 c/deg", confirmed behaviourally by observers seeing aliasing above it. Webvision gives the same range, "about 50 to 60 cycles per degree", for photopic viewing through the eye’s own optics.

Loading your journal