Author Topic: laser sighter and mueller/simmons scopes (Read 458 times)

ScatterGunner · « **on:** April 13, 2005, 05:48:27 PM »

me and the dog took a ride in the old biscayne monday and ended up at gander mountain.

they had a nice little laser sighter on sale for 50 bucks and change so i grabbed one.

quickdtoo mentioned a nice scope, the mueller eradicator, i ordered up one of those on the internet, not a bad piece of optics.

my first comments on the eradicator; great optics. you can't beat the 50mm lense to gather light !

sadly, i am not a fan of red dots at all. i know they are good for constrained ranges and work perfectly within them, but i can't get past the parallax the red dots have. it may be economics, but i cannot for the life of me figure out why they can't stabilize the dot over a large range of focal length.

i compared the eradicator to my standard scope, a simmons pro-50 6 - 18x. the eradicator has better lense coatings and provides a crisper and brighter picture than the simmons in my opinion. but the eradicator was close to twice the price of the simmons. no doubt though, the eradicator with the red dot turned off is a great piece of optics. i give it a thumbs up !

the laser sighter was a treat to use. it came with the laser capsule, two screw in barrel rods, a bunch of 0-Rings, a target, and no frills instructions on a sheet of paper.

you hang the target 25 feet away from your bench, stick the laser pointer down the barrel, take aim at the target, and dial in the scope to zero in on a cross mark just above were the laser spot hits in the target center.

i sighted in two rifles, a 22 rim fire sportster and my brand new ruger 204 handi. fresh from the laser sighting, the 22 hit the paper at 50 yards (not dead center) and the 204 hit the target at 100 yards. both needed further tweaking but heck, it hit the target after one simple aiming operation !

sg

quickdtoo · « **Reply #1 on:** April 13, 2005, 06:31:15 PM »

SG, I think you're confused about the dot reticle of the Mueller scopes, the reticle in them is an illuminated etched glass reticle as opposed to the red dot scope's superimposed or reflected dot. There is no parallax error when the AO is set properly on the Eraticator, that's the purpose of the AO. On a standard red dot scope, there is no reticle if the illumination control isn't turned on, big difference. There's nothing in common between the two other than they both have lenses and an illumination control, after that they are 2 different critters.

ScatterGunner · « **Reply #2 on:** April 14, 2005, 03:03:22 AM »

you're right !

i didn't bother to turn the red dot (reticle illuminator [duh !]) on because of my predetermined opinion that they stink. but i stand corrected !

after re-reading my earlier post, i noticed i said it a great scope with the red dot "turned off" !, this just shows how being stubborn can cloud ones judgement !

i am somewhat of a hacker grade amateur astrophotographer and BIG lenses appeal to me (fast optics), the 50mm lense was enough for me. the illuminated reticle is bonus points on an otherwise great sight picture.

i can't find any lense coating references on either scope, i wish they would post that in the manual or website in terms of other than 'coated optics'. the makeup of the coatings make huge differences in the colors you see, the reflections, and effects of ambient light levels.

this is a sticking point for me for a really cool reason. they use coatings to change how light travels through the lenses. lenses bend the light and focus it on your retina. the big lense in front collects a lot of light and reduces it to a small spot on in your eye. the smaller the front lense, the dimmer the sight picture. also, the more the lense "bends" the light to focus it, the more it acts like a prism, this causes the red light to reach your eye before the blue light does and you see this effect as small rainbows, or as 3-D patterns on what is otherwise a flat surface. smaller front lenses with high degrees of "magnification" promote this effect. the technical name for this effect is chromatic dispersion, it simply means that the different colors of light travel at different speeds as it passes through the lenses.

a good test to see if your scope exhibits this effect is look at a thin twig at high magnifications, you will see thin "rainbows" along the edge of the twig !

i gotta stop drinking so much coffee !!! :grin:

sg

fortress49 · « **Reply #3 on:** April 14, 2005, 05:00:15 AM »

OK, here is a question from ignorance. What is AO when mentioned in connection with a scope?

Matt

quickdtoo · « **Reply #4 on:** April 14, 2005, 05:03:26 AM »

The web site states that they are fully multi-coated which is as good as it gets for current optics, I'll ask Rich if he knows any further specs on the coatings for ya.

Tim

fortress49 · « **Reply #5 on:** April 14, 2005, 05:37:24 AM »

Scattergunner,

A bit off subject...I am an amteur astronomer. I have a Televue-85. I have not used it much since we moved to Texas (Houston). The light pollution is so severe that most times you cannot see the big dipper! The TV-85 has great correction for chromatic aberation! It would make a great spotting scope except it is a bit heavy to carry around!

The "purple haze' that you see when looking at branches and twigs through inferior scopes and optics is a tell-tell sign of scopes that are not corrected for this problem.

Matt

quickdtoo · « **Reply #6 on:** April 14, 2005, 05:46:58 AM »

Quote from: fortress49

OK, here is a question from ignorance. What is AO when mentioned in connection with a scope?

Matt

AO = Adjustable Objective which corrects for parallax error at any range within the AO's capabilities which can be from as little as 10yds all the way to infinity.

http://www.eabco.com/Reports/report01.html

fortress49 · « **Reply #7 on:** April 14, 2005, 06:46:02 AM »

Thanks Quick! I am familiar with many terms dealing with telescopes from my astronomy hobby, but I had not run across the AO term. I have not heard of that being present in astronomy scopes.

The article from ed Brown explained things well.

Thanks again,

Matt

quickdtoo · « **Reply #8 on:** April 14, 2005, 06:54:09 AM »

SG, the fully multi-coated lense coating consists of 18 layers and is called Euro coat.

Matt, the parallax error wouldn't apply to astronomical distances unless you were trying to launch a projectile at whatever you were looking at!! Parallax shows up at relative movement between the reticle and the target as you move your eye around behind the ocular lense, since there's no reticle in astronomical optics, there would be no parallax evident even though I'm sure it exists, but would be inconsequential.

Hope this helps,

Tim

ScatterGunner · « **Reply #9 on:** April 14, 2005, 07:03:31 AM »

hi fortress -

the optics terms between gun scopes and astronomy are two different languages !

i use a meade 10" schmidt cassegrain with an extra heavy tripod. i live in the sticks and have zero background light that is not under my control.

i guess because of the gun scope application, we really dont need to be concerned about optics speed, correction disks, etc. i just go off on tangents all the time !

sg