What the MX1000 looks like when you can see infrared

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Frangible

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 25, 2003
Messages
269
I took some pics of my Logitech MX1000 with my digital camera and Generation 2 night vision scope which can see infrared. Enjoy. It's actually blindingly bright indoors to the scope. Outdoors I had trouble seeing it past about 100m.

I could not see the beam itself, but I can see the beam of my green laser pointer with the scope.

mx1000_1.jpg

mx1000_2.jpg

mx1000_3.jpg
 
DUUUUuuude...SWEEEEeeett....

(sorry)

I wonder how long it'll be before someone takes the laser and sensor array out and rigs it into a security beam type thing. :p
 
I wonder how your IR scope managed to see a narrowband green laser? They aren't supposed to respond to green wavelengths. It could be that the minute amount of heat from the laser heated the panel on the truck to make it glow in that spot. Not much heat but those scopes are sensitive as hell.
 
MisterDNA said:
I wonder how your IR scope managed to see a narrowband green laser? They aren't supposed to respond to green wavelengths. It could be that the minute amount of heat from the laser heated the panel on the truck to make it glow in that spot. Not much heat but those scopes are sensitive as hell.
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I bet that's it, if you notice, we aren't seeing the beam itself.
 
I wonder how your IR scope managed to see a narrowband green laser? They aren't supposed to respond to green wavelengths. It could be that the minute amount of heat from the laser heated the panel on the truck to make it glow in that spot. Not much heat but those scopes are sensitive as hell.
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Ok, there are two types of night vision equipment-- thermal, and image intensifiers.

Thermal imagers are like what the Predator had in the movie Predator. They allow you to see body heat and heat from objects. They're hellaciously expensive, and I don't have one... but I'd like to.

What I do have is an image intensifier. It's a vacuum tube with a photocathode on one end, and a phosphor on the other. Photons strike the photocathode. They're converted to electrons, accellerated and multiplied in the microchannel plate, then hit the phosphor screen greatly intensified.

A generation 2 scope like I have uses a S-25 multialkali photocathode which is sensitive to not only visible light, but infrared light as well.

Confused?

Well, there are basically two types of infrared light: thermal emissions, and near infrared.

Near infrared is what the MX's laser is. It's also what your TV remotes use. It acts the same as red light, only the human eye cannot see it. CCDs and image intensification tubes can.

Thermal emissions are something else entirely, and a thermal imager would NOT be able to see the MX1000's laser beam at all.

BTW-- the images appear green, but that isn't because there is necessarily any green light in any of them. They're a monochrome image formed of all the visible and near-IR light that the tube gathers and converts to electrons. They are green because that is what color the phosphor is. The phosphor can be any color... red, hot pink, orange... it's just green because the human eye is most sensitive to green light.

So, just to make sure we're clear, there is no thermal IR viewing here. I don't have that equipment. Just near-IR that behaves like red light.

Hope that helps.
 
Frangible said:
Ok, there are two types of night vision equipment-- thermal, and image intensifiers.

Thermal imagers are like what the Predator had in the movie Predator. They allow you to see body heat and heat from objects. They're hellaciously expensive, and I don't have one... but I'd like to.

What I do have is an image intensifier. It's a vacuum tube with a photocathode on one end, and a phosphor on the other. Photons strike the photocathode. They're converted to electrons, accellerated and multiplied in the microchannel plate, then hit the phosphor screen greatly intensified.

A generation 2 scope like I have uses a S-25 multialkali photocathode which is sensitive to not only visible light, but infrared light as well.

Confused?

Well, there are basically two types of infrared light: thermal emissions, and near infrared.

Near infrared is what the MX's laser is. It's also what your TV remotes use. It acts the same as red light, only the human eye cannot see it. CCDs and image intensification tubes can.

Thermal emissions are something else entirely, and a thermal imager would NOT be able to see the MX1000's laser beam at all.

BTW-- the images appear green, but that isn't because there is necessarily any green light in any of them. They're a monochrome image formed of all the visible and near-IR light that the tube gathers and converts to electrons. They are green because that is what color the phosphor is. The phosphor can be any color... red, hot pink, orange... it's just green because the human eye is most sensitive to green light.

So, just to make sure we're clear, there is no thermal IR viewing here. I don't have that equipment. Just near-IR that behaves like red light.

Hope that helps.
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i thought your eye was most sensitive to red light??
 
Green light stimulates both the red and green cones in the eye, thus making it brightest.

specsens.gif

from http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/color1.html

64% of the cones in your eyes are red cones, and 32% are green cones, thus green light will simulatenously stimulate 96% of the cones in your eyes.

Red light only gets 64%, and blue light, a mere 4%.
 
If we ever get invaded I know to get my mx1000 out and mount that bitch to my luger! ... owned!
 
xSyzygy666x said:
i thought your eye was most sensitive to red light??
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No, your BRAIN is most sensitive to red light.

Your retina is most sensitive to yellow light, actually. (Evolution matches our peak response to sunlight's blackbody color. ;))
 
Stiletto One said:
No, your BRAIN is most sensitive to red light.

Your retina is most sensitive to yellow light, actually. (Evolution matches our peak response to sunlight's blackbody color. ;))
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Blackbody colour? Elaborate?
 
Stiletto One said:
No, your BRAIN is most sensitive to red light.

Your retina is most sensitive to yellow light, actually. (Evolution matches our peak response to sunlight's blackbody color. ;))
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Not exactly yellow. There's a several nanometer shift between normal light conditions and dark conditions in our peak sensitivity, but its around 550 nm I believe, aka: green. Yellow however stimulates our eyes a lot because it simultaneously excites our green and red sensitivity. Now how our cones' color sensitivity actually works is somewhat still up for debate... but thats a simple way of putting it.

and to the thread starter, if your scope is only detecting IR, and it can detect your green laser beam, then your laser is not sufficiently filtering out the IR emissions. I have a green laser pointer which pretty much cannot be detected in the IR... which is technically how they should be.
 
dwayne001 said:
Blackbody colour? Elaborate?
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There's different ways of looking at how the cones in our eyes work, but basically theres red, green and blue detectors. We have the most green cones, followed by red and then blue. Yellow excites red and green (which I mentioned) and thats why a yellow object technically of the same reflectance as another colored object will appear brightest to us. Green is also very bright and blue is going to be the darkest basically.

The blackbody radiator is a method for determining color temperature, a furnace heated to a certain temperature will glow internally with a certain color. Warmer being bluer and cooler being yellower. Color temperatures are measured in Kelvin, the higher the Kelvin the bluer the light. You can play with this with many digital cameras by fiddling with the color balance (color temperature).
 
emorphien said:
and to the thread starter, if your scope is only detecting IR, and it can detect your green laser beam, then your laser is not sufficiently filtering out the IR emissions. I have a green laser pointer which pretty much cannot be detected in the IR... which is technically how they should be.
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He's got an IR-sensitive photomultiplier, not an IR scope.

As for eyesight stuff: nifty. Got a link? I want to read up more about this sensitivity shift between low and high light conditions. (Is it something to do with the response curves of rods vs. cones?)
 
Stiletto One said:
He's got an IR-sensitive photomultiplier, not an IR scope.

As for eyesight stuff: nifty. Got a link? I want to read up more about this sensitivity shift between low and high light conditions. (Is it something to do with the response curves of rods vs. cones?)
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yeah, both the rods and cones are most sensitive to green. The majority of cones are green sensitive and the rods are just plain more sensitive to green.

Scotopic vision is when the light levels are low and our cones are ineffective. In the dark we pretty much see in grayscale, but our peak sensitivity is to a wavelength of around 507 nm (kind of blueish-green technically). Photopic vision is in normal daylight type conditions where our cones come in to use and we can see color and the wavelength we are most sensitive with the cones is 555 nm.

Different sources will give you a lot of different data unfortunately, but essentially thats the gist of it.

Other cool information, at night when everything seems really noisy is because chemicals flood in to the rods to increase sensitivity and much like increasing the ISO on a digital camera this also increases noise. And also, if you've got bad vision you can see this well, those little swimmy things you see floating around blurry lights are longer chains of the fluid in the eyes or something, and it's perfectly normal. I'd be more specific and tell you the name of it, but I only learned of it through a friend who was talking about it so I don't remember the details (friend who does opthalmic photography and other eyeball things).
 
emorphien said:
GOOD SHIT
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Cool. :)

Trivia: those floaters are actually chunks of the blood vessels that were in your eyes when you were a fetus, supplying blood to the cells that generated the tissues of your eyeballs.
 
Stiletto One said:
Trivia: those floaters are actually chunks of the blood vessels that were in your eyes when you were a fetus, supplying blood to the cells that generated the tissues of your eyeballs.
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It's those too, but I believe what I was told was that as you age the gel in your eye can start to thicken and form those strands too.
 
emorphien said:
It's those too, but I believe what I was told was that as you age the gel in your eye can start to thicken and form those strands too.
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Vitreous humor? (I think I spelled that right...) Pretty sure it doesn't...the only thing that usually happens to that stuff is cloudiness (too much protein, I think), also known as "cataract". If thickening into macroscopic strands was a common phenomenon, cataracts would become a LOT more common than they are.

I pulled the bit about stranding leading to cataracts out of my ass, but it sounds reasonable.
 
Stiletto One said:
Vitreous humor? (I think I spelled that right...) Pretty sure it doesn't...the only thing that usually happens to that stuff is cloudiness (too much protein, I think), also known as "cataract". If thickening into macroscopic strands was a common phenomenon, cataracts would become a LOT more common than they are.

I pulled the bit about stranding leading to cataracts out of my ass, but it sounds reasonable.
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Vitreous Humor it is I believe, that sounds familiar. The formation of some strands isn't at all out of the ordinary apparently, but it's not like they're in huge quantities either.
 
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