Sectoral heterochromia in an all-white cat

This is called sectoral heterochromia. It is rare and beautiful. No health issues. You do see it in domestic cats. The cat is all-white. It is the dominant white gene which affects eye pigmentation creation in the embryonic stage. It causes the removal of melanin pigment across a part of the iris. The blue color is caused by light refraction only (not blue pigment). The yellow by pigment (eumelanin). All-white cats have no pigment in the hair strands. This is why they can get sunburnt ears - no pigment to block sun and in any case the hairs are thin there.

The normal, most common, sort of heterochromia in cats is when they have odd-eyes. One eye is blue and the other is yellow normally. But there are various types of heterochromia and the one we see on this page is called sectoral heterochromia because each eye is divided up into two colours i.e. there are two sections to the eyes. Turkish Angoras sometimes have odd-eyes and they are favoured. They are often all-white cats too. The classic real Turkish Angora is all-white with odd-eye colour.

The cat below looks a bit like an Angora but is not to the best of my knowledge.

Sectoral heterochromia in an all-white cat. Photo: Reddit.com.

Cat's Eye Nebula is a celebration of cat's eyes

There is a nebula in space, millions of light years away, which is called the Cat's Eye Nebula. It is a beautiful, gaseous object that was first discovered by William Herschel on February 15, 1786. Although it is difficult to measure its distance from Earth, it is believed to be 3300 light years away. This means it would take 3300 years to travel to the nebula when travelling at the speed of light which is 186,000 mi/s or 300,000 km/s. The photograph is a composite image of three different images taken at different wavelengths. The images were taken by the Wide Field Planetary Camera-2.

Cat's Eye Nebula. Photo: Wikipedia under CC license.

Surprisingly to me, it's estimated age is believed to be 1000 years ± 260 years.

Turning to cats! The domestic cat's eye is a beautiful object. There are two perhaps four things that come to mind, immediately. Firstly, we all know that there is a reflective layer behind the retina which directs light back onto the retina which in turn enhances the eye's ability to detect objects in low light conditions. The cat's eye also has a preponderance of rods over cones which are designed to detect light under difficult conditions and produce a black-and-white image. Thirdly, a kitten's eyes have no colour or pigmentation in the iris and are therefore blue due to the refraction of daylight through the eye. Fourthly, in the cat fancy, breed standards dictate the colour of the eyes of any one cat breed. They may be a wide selection to choose from but sometimes they have to be just one colour such as for the Russian Blue whose eyes have to be vivid green.

Russian Blue vivid green eye colour per breed standard. Pic: in public domain.

Video of tabby cat with bright emerald eyes

This is a video on Reddit.com of a tabby cat with the most astonishing emerald eyes. Initially when I saw a still image of the cat (and not the video) I thought that this was an example of excellent photo-editing. But can you photo-edit video material like this? I think you can because I just can't bring myself to believe that this eye colour is genuine.

Update: the video failed. They always do from Reddit. They are hopeless on embedded videos. So hopeless that I think they deliberately make them fail. But if you click here you can see it on Reddit (hopefully).

Here is a screenshot from the video:

Tabby cat with bright emerald eyes. Screenshot.

But, you know, I could be wrong. It could be genuine. I'd love someone to tell me that I am wrong in a comment. Amazing cat. He/she should have an Instagram page. I can't find a page on Instagram which features this cat. Is that proof that the eyes are too special to be real?