Bringing iron sights into the 21 century
Arthur C. Clarke wrote “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”. Magic is the first word that came to mind when I read about the MicroSight which has been developed at the Idaho National Laboratory. The new gun sight allows a shooter to focus on the front sight and on the target at the same time.
One day, Crandall was leafing through an optics textbook, and he stumbled across a section on “zone plates.” Zone plates are optical devices that resemble lenses. But whereas lenses focus light using refraction — essentially, changing the direction of light waves by changing their speed — zone plates use diffraction. Diffraction describes how waves bend, break up, spread out and interfere with each other as they encounter obstacles. The diffraction of sound waves, for example, explains how you can hear someone’s voice from around a corner.
The technology has been licensed to Apollo Optical Systems, who are working on bringing it to the market.
AccurateShooter has also blogged about the sights.
[ Many thanks to David for emailing me the link. ]
I founded TFB in 2007 and over 10 years worked tirelessly, with the help of my team, to build it up into the largest gun blog online. I retired as Editor in Chief in 2017. During my decade at TFB I was fortunate to work with the most amazing talented writers and genuinely good people!
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Iron sights serve as backup sights in case your optics fail or due to environmental conditions optics become useless (mud or oil or whatever).
This technology basically takes away one of the main advantages of iron sights. Saying that if they make the lens easily removable, just in case it does get dirty or is broken, then I'm satisfied.
I hope to see one of these in the rear sight piece for a DCM
Garand. If it wasn't useful the old one should still work. Of course you would have to be a good enough gunsmith to change them ( that isn't much trouble).