Fair warning: super nerdy wordy post incoming.
I've been doing research on new scopes and wanna make sure I'm understanding exit pupil and it's importance with dusk and dawn settings.
So, from what I understand anytime the exit pupil on your scope is smaller than the pupil of your eyeball it makes the image look dark. In effect, your eyeball is seeing the entire image in half of the opening and its seeing black around it so your brain Grey's out the scope image and makes it look super dark. Therefore, with most of these new higher power scopes you should actually back off the magnification during the dawn and dusk in order to make sure your eyeball pupil is the same size or smaller than the scope pupil and not artificially greying the image.
This then makes me wonder what the eye pupil actually is and therefore what the exit pupil needs to be. According to the link below, the eye pupil fluctuates between 2 and 8 mm. I'm going to go ahead and cut it off at 6mm because we never really hunt at night. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6634360/
So, what's this mean? I'll take a look at viper pst gen 2 5-25x50 because thats what I learned I had these issues on lol. The viper pst gen 2 has an exit pupil of 2mm at 25x mag (roughly, the exit pupil can be estimated as the objective diameter divided by the magnification or 50/25=2
) which is fine in bright daylight because your eye is dialated. However, I found when I was looking into shadows, that the scope looked significantly brighter at 20x. So, if I'm looking at a hunting scenario on the viper and my eyes are at 6mm then the 50mm/6mm = 8.33x magnification max to still be viewed through without greying. Taking this a step further because I like FFP scopes, if the reticle isn't visible at the max daw-dusk magnification because youre at 8.33x mag and cant see the reticle then its kinda useless for my needs. If you're using a SFP, that means that you would probably have to reduce magnification and it screws up your reticle subtensions.
If you've made it this far and have followed along with what I've stated: your a champ! Anything I screwed up? Am I not understanding something correctly?
I've been doing research on new scopes and wanna make sure I'm understanding exit pupil and it's importance with dusk and dawn settings.
So, from what I understand anytime the exit pupil on your scope is smaller than the pupil of your eyeball it makes the image look dark. In effect, your eyeball is seeing the entire image in half of the opening and its seeing black around it so your brain Grey's out the scope image and makes it look super dark. Therefore, with most of these new higher power scopes you should actually back off the magnification during the dawn and dusk in order to make sure your eyeball pupil is the same size or smaller than the scope pupil and not artificially greying the image.
This then makes me wonder what the eye pupil actually is and therefore what the exit pupil needs to be. According to the link below, the eye pupil fluctuates between 2 and 8 mm. I'm going to go ahead and cut it off at 6mm because we never really hunt at night. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6634360/
So, what's this mean? I'll take a look at viper pst gen 2 5-25x50 because thats what I learned I had these issues on lol. The viper pst gen 2 has an exit pupil of 2mm at 25x mag (roughly, the exit pupil can be estimated as the objective diameter divided by the magnification or 50/25=2
If you've made it this far and have followed along with what I've stated: your a champ! Anything I screwed up? Am I not understanding something correctly?
