Field of view

Field of view is the angular or spatial extent of a scene visible through an optical instrument. It depends on the instrument’s optics, sensor or image plane, and viewing distance.

Angle of view: The angular width of a scene captured or seen by an optical system. It expresses field of view as an angle, especially for cameras and lenses.
Camera lens: An optical assembly that focuses light to form an image on a camera’s sensor or film. Its focal length and image circle help determine the camera’s field of view.
Depth of field: The range of object distances that appear acceptably sharp in an image. It concerns focus along depth, not the scene’s angular or spatial extent.
Geometric optics: The model of light as rays traveling along paths governed by reflection and refraction. It provides the ray diagrams used to derive many field-of-view relationships.
Focal length: The distance that characterizes how strongly an optical system converges or diverges light. For a fixed sensor size, focal length determines how wide an angle the camera captures.
Telescope: An optical instrument that collects and magnifies light from distant objects. Its eyepiece and objective define how much sky is visible at once.
Depth of focus: The range of image-plane positions over which an optical image remains acceptably sharp. It describes tolerance at the image plane rather than visible scene coverage.
Thin lens: An idealized lens whose thickness is negligible compared with its focal lengths and object distances. Thin-lens geometry links object distance, image distance, and the extent projected onto an image plane.
Image sensor format: The physical dimensions of a camera’s image sensor, commonly described by its width and height. A larger sensor captures a wider angle with the same lens and viewpoint.
Binoculars: A handheld optical instrument with two telescopes that provides magnified, binocular vision. Their field of view is commonly specified as an apparent angle or width at a distance.

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