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28-04-2008, 01:48pm
It's always a knee-jerk reaction, or a revenue raising excersize or both.
We have the similar issue over in the Astronomy village with the green laser pointers.
They are absolutely fantastic for pointing out things in the sky when you are doing an educational gathering etc.
Then you get the wankers that point at the planes & at footy games etc.
Now the Gov are banning them & anyone who wants to use a pointer must have a permit. (which costs money)
Here's a comment from a guy on the astro forum who is very much into industrial lasers.
One has to understand that laser beams are not perfectly parralel. If that would be the case then one would never be able to point it through an airplane's window let alone hit the pilot's eye (what about the other eye?).
Reality is that at say one kilometer distance the beam width is perhaps one meter or more.
Now do the maths: When you expand a beam from something like one milimeter to something like one meter how much do you reduce the intensity of that beam? A young pilot's pupils add up to less then one square cm while the beam cross section is close to 8000 square centimeters.
So out of a 100mW beam the pilot's eyes would capture short flashes at an intensity of 0.01mW, hardly enough to cause harm. I said short flashes because
one would need superhuman pointing ability to maintain that sort of aim.
I hate bans of any kind. Lock up some of these idiots but don't ban the lasers.
And he is describing a 100mW laser.
The average green laser pointer is only about 20mW.
We have the similar issue over in the Astronomy village with the green laser pointers.
They are absolutely fantastic for pointing out things in the sky when you are doing an educational gathering etc.
Then you get the wankers that point at the planes & at footy games etc.
Now the Gov are banning them & anyone who wants to use a pointer must have a permit. (which costs money)
Here's a comment from a guy on the astro forum who is very much into industrial lasers.
One has to understand that laser beams are not perfectly parralel. If that would be the case then one would never be able to point it through an airplane's window let alone hit the pilot's eye (what about the other eye?).
Reality is that at say one kilometer distance the beam width is perhaps one meter or more.
Now do the maths: When you expand a beam from something like one milimeter to something like one meter how much do you reduce the intensity of that beam? A young pilot's pupils add up to less then one square cm while the beam cross section is close to 8000 square centimeters.
So out of a 100mW beam the pilot's eyes would capture short flashes at an intensity of 0.01mW, hardly enough to cause harm. I said short flashes because
one would need superhuman pointing ability to maintain that sort of aim.
I hate bans of any kind. Lock up some of these idiots but don't ban the lasers.
And he is describing a 100mW laser.
The average green laser pointer is only about 20mW.