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How to Make Unbelievable Shots Using Handgun Scopes
When you’re talking optics, there’s a scope application for just about everyone. Many people are loyal to certain brands regardless of price while others are just looking for a great deal. No matter what your reasons, you’ll have to choose based on your shooting criteria. In other words, you’ll want to match proper scope to whatever type of shooting you’ll be doing.
In this article, I’m going to focus on subject of extended eye relief and tell you why it is most important feature when choosing a handgun scope. A little knowledge can go a long way before making your scope selection.
But first, before I explain how it works, I want to give you a brief, “general” description of what Extended Eye Relief is. Some readers might be new to subject, so I’ll want to get them up to speed.
Essentially, eye relief is distance between your eye and rear lens (ocular lens) of scope when full field of view is visible.
Now that might seem like a very simplistic definition of what EER is, but how do you actually determine proper extended eye relief with a full field of view?
Try this. The next time you look through a scope, move your head around or scope varying distances from your eye. You’ll begin to notice a black ring or shadow in your site picture. When black ring or shadow is completely eliminated from your picture, your target should fill entire inside diameter of eye piece and be completely centered within scope. Once you see that, you’ll know you have a full field of view and you’ll be able to measure distance of eye relief.
This is critically important when choosing a handgun scope because you’ll probably be holding scope anywhere between 5 to 30 inches away from your eye. If you don’t have proper full field of view at these distances, you’ll have to adjust your shooting stance in order to accommodate scope, something you’ll want to avoid because your shooting accuracy will more than likely suffer.
Keep in mind that your goal is to make scope work for you, not other way around.
Something you should also know is that Extended Eye Relief changes with magnification in variable power scopes. Generally speaking, higher magnification less eye relief you have. This is important for those hunters or competition shooters whose target sits at a significant distance.
When higher magnification is used, field of view narrows sometimes making it a little more difficult to acquire target, especially if target is moving. The trade off is that even though there is less visual information for you to process, target is magnified by number of times you dialed in on scope, making it easier to see your target once it’s in your field of view.
If, however, you’re going to be hunting or shooting in areas where your shots will be close and you’re not using a rest, then you’ll need little magnification and a large field of view. A larger field of view will always allow for quicker target location, especially one that’s difficult to see with unaided eye. Just make sure that you have proper field of view as discussed earlier.
Some of you may be wondering what magnification numbers from spec. sheet actually mean.
Let me explain. Let’s say you have a scope that is 2x20mm. The first number is apparent magnification power where 2 means your target looks twice as large through scope as it does over iron sights. The last number, 20, is diameter of front lens (also called objective lens) measured in millimeters. In general, larger objective lens, more light gathering capabilities it carries and can therefore be used in lower light conditions.
Because in above example there is no other number associated with number 2, this tells you that this is a fixed power scope. If it were written 2-8x28mm, then this would be a variable power scope with 2 being lowest magnification and 8 being highest magnification. Again, 28 represents size of objective lens in millimeters.
