#IRLight

Welcome nocturnal aficionados to another installment of Friday Night Lights. Today we take a look at a relative newcomer to helmet-mounted administrative lighting. Streamlight has expanded their Sidewinder series of military lights and made the Sidewinder Stalk. It is a helmet light that has a variety of attachment methods and is dual fuel and multi-spectrum. Let’s take a closer look.

This idea came about during a TFB work chat. Will P’s friend, Kevin Z, was curious if he could project an illuminator through a scope and aim with it. Hmmm, interesting. Could this work? Some of the TFB staff was skeptical. I was intrigued and it sounded like a fun experiment. I had some ideas and it is not totally crazy. Could an infrared projected reticle actually work? Let’s find out, FOR SCIENCE!!

For a specific end-user that wanted to rule the night, Surefire designed the XC2-IRC. The unit remains unnamed, but they had a requirement for a very compact IR light and IR aiming laser in combination.

At SHOT Show 2019 Streamlight showed off their new TLR-VIR II. It is a compact pistol weapon light that is night vision friendly. It has visible white light, IR illuminator, and an IR laser. The best part? It costs less than the SureFire X400V.

Back in 2015 a biochemistry researcher, Gabriel Licina, volunteered to take Chlorin e6 eye drops to biohack his eyeballs for natural night vision. Fellow TFB writer Richard L. wrote an article about your actual Natural Night Vision. Well, recently scientists in China and the University of Massachusetts have developed an eyeball injection that allows mice to detect infrared light without compromising regular vision.

While checking out the new lights at the Streamlight booth, their tan pistol light caught my eye. The TLR-VIR II is Streamlight’s take on an IR laser pistol light. They also have a laser integrated HLX weaponlight and a new shotgun weaponlight.

What is night vision? When we think of night vision we normally visualize images from the iconic green phosphorous image intensifier seen in countless movies and video games. However, we often do not realize that thermal is also an important component of night vision technology as well. Like firearms, night vision is yet just another tool that if used properly can be significantly beneficial to the user. The basic premises behind night vision is rather self explanatory, as a tool that allows the user to see in the dark.

Paul Kim (PK) has posted an update of his new M52 weapon light which we posted about on April 24. PK posted up this weaponlight Lego map showng all the combination of setups you can have with his line of flashlights. There are some very interesting developments in that map. It seems he is making IR heads and laser modules.

Steiner Laser Devices makes the infamous line of DBAL laser designators. DBAL stands for Dual Beam Aiming Laser. They have both visible and infrared lasers. They also make a DBAL-PL for hand guns. It is a bit bigger than your typical pistol light but it is packed with lights and lasers.