Black Rifles & Green Eyes | Night Vision History & Evolution

On today’s show with GunBroker, we’re talking black rifles and green eyes, otherwise known as night vision. We start out talking about the first true generation of night vision – the starlight scope. Usually used in special purpose missions, they looked like a giant spotlight and mounted generally on an M1 Carbine. Thankfully, we’ve made huge advancements through today’s 3rd generation night vision. Make sure to listen in to this episode brought to you by GunBroker, to hear an in-depth conversation on night vision and thermal optics! Next, we dive into night vision hunting which has skyrocketed in popularity for game like wild hogs. Make sure you check into your local game laws however, because this isn’t legal everywhere and there are some rules you need to make sure you follow. We also dive into the difference between green and white phosphor, which have major differences between them. White phosphor provides a large jump in optics with visuals being way more crisp compared to green phosphor. We also discuss the differences between night vision and thermal optics. Night vision optics absolutely cannot be used during the daytime due to how they process light, but thermals absolutely can be used during the daytime. However, your image will certainly not have as much clarity on your targets if the temperature differences aren’t as high like during the nighttime. A huge use case for thermal optics is in the recovery of game animals. Thermal optics provide terrific blood tracking capabilities that can help provide trackers with fantastic recovery efforts, including seeing the downed animal. One of the downfalls of night vision is that depth perception gets thrown off quickly. However, with that being said, a lot of that can be trained out with serious training time and as always, it’s way better to have night vision if your enemies do not! Closing out, Allen dives into the different options for night vision at GunBroker. He covers a multitude of different options from the cheap end to however much you’d like to spend, there are options out there for you whether you want to outfit your helmet or your firearm. The show launches every Thursday morning. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.