Anyone able to point me to info or school me on IR scopes?

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Saakee

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I've been reading "Not Again...(not putting the rest of the full stops in)! Feral Hog Control in East Texas" [at about post 1111 currently] and wondered about using a 250+ lumen IR flashlight underslung of the barrel with an Infrared scope for better illumination of targets.
 
When you say infrared, I'm assuming you mean night vision, am I thinking correctly? Or do you mean thermal? I don't want to waste your time with a lengthy answer about the wrong type of scope. I know a little about both though.
 
Yes, a 250 lumen illuminator should give you pretty good range, but you are really limited by the quality of your optic.

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It could give you good illumination in open country, but not in the woods. By that, I mean that most such lights are not collimated and so the beam cannot be narrowed down enough to reduce the flood or splash (all the extra light outside of the hot center of the beam) which is going to be reflected back at you and cause you to not be able to see behind whatever is in the foregorund. All of the splash can and often will over illuminate the closer stuff and make it hard or impossible to see beyond the closer stuff to the less well illuminated stuff further away. So inside the woods, that much power may not be terrible beneficial if not in the right package.

Also, it isn't like there is just one kinds of IR. If you are using a Gen I scope, it is not going to work well with a 900+ nm IR light. Most of the IR lights that I see advertising are 940 nms. They produce less visible light at the source that the lower nm lights that are closer to the visible spectrum. With Gen I, you will want and 800s nm light, ideally very low 800s. It will work GREAT with Gen II or III as well. It is more visible at the source than the 900s IR illuminators. The 800s have a brighter dull red glow than the 900s. However, the 800s are detectable over a longer range as well.
 
^agreed. I don't know as much about the technical aspects such as wavelength, but I can run a pair of nods. The way I was trained was to run the nod over your non dominant eye. Reason being, when you aim your weapon with the ir laser/illuminator, you don't have to look through your sights, but say you go into a lit up area, now you can flip up your night vision and your dominant eye, that you're now using to aim, is already adjusted to the light. One thing to remember is that after long periods looking through night vision of any type, be it goggles or a scope, is that you won't be able to see anything out of that eye for a few minutes due to the green glow after you look away from the device. You're vision will be blurred and everything will look purple. Hunting with night vision scopes isn't to bad. It's easy to the point of almost being cheating in the open, to being slightly advantageous in the woods. Only downside is that once you look away from the scope, you're blind again.
 
A lot easier to understand than the various websites i've found. NOD is nv optical device?

I've noticed people using green lasers, does the laser really illuminate well? I have to admit when i imagine it, i really don't see the splash from a laser lighting up a pig so well but the thread i ref: in OP he makes it sound like it does incredibly well.

Would an 808nm, just barely above the visible spectrum, be a better choice instead of a green tac-laser?
 
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