Pistol sights
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Pistol sights
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Re: Pistol sights
#2Near the end of the article, he mentions that some people say that it's more difficult to aim a weapon that has a shorter sight radius. Actually, I think it's more accurate to say that having your sights out of alignment with shorter sight radius will have a more dramatic effect on your accuracy.
Re: Pistol sights
#3[deleted]
Re: Pistol sights
#4> I was told once by a proficient pistol shooter that he ignored where the front sight was on the target, and paid attention only to the alignment of the two sights relative to each other. Since he did in fact hit the target,
is the "two sights" here the rear sight which has two posts, or the two sites as in front sight + rear sight?
several pages of reading and then .. an ambiguously worded conclusion.
Re: Pistol sights
#5Near the end of the article, he mentions that some people say that it's more difficult to aim a weapon that has a shorter sight radius. Actually, I think it's more accurate to say that having your sights out of alignment with shorter sight radius will have a more dramatic effect on your accuracy.
Or put another way, a shorter sight radius by a factor of X makes it X times harder to visually confirm your iron sights are correctly aligned. This makes the visual-mental-physical feedback loop of keeping them aligned as precisely as you possibly can, much more difficult.
Shooting accurately is much more than just physically holding the barrel steady; it's a whole "symphony" of coordination, involving physical, visual and mental components.
Re: Pistol sights
#6> I was told once by a proficient pistol shooter that he ignored where the front sight was on the target, and paid attention only to the alignment of the two sights relative to each other. Since he did in fact hit the target, is the "two sights" here the rear sight which has two posts, or the two sites as in front sight + rear sight? several pages of reading and then .. an ambiguously worded conclusion.
He means the sights. Like you said, the rear site is composed of two posts, the front sight has one post.
Re: Pistol sights
#7If you're interested in the science behind this, you may be even more interested in learning how peephole style rear iron sights almost eliminate the dual sight alignment problem of goal-post style rear sights (as commonly found on pistols).
The rear peep sight on rifles take advantage of actual "optical effects", without any glass -- much like a pinhole camera can actually magnify images without any lenses or mirrors at all.
By simply providing an arbitrarily small "aperature" you're looking through in the rear, the front-rear sight alignment problem is not only capped at an upper bound of error (defined by the peephole size and sight radius), but the actual error from front-rear sight misalignment is visually magnified and centered through a fixed viewing point, making it vastly easier to keep the actual error near zero.
So generally, to achieve precision within the (small) upper bound of error with a peephole sight, all you need to do is place the front sight post on the target when looking through the rear peep sight. Even better precision is made much easier via a sort of "peephole camera" effect through the aperature of the rear sight.
Re: Pistol sights
#8If you're interested in the science behind this, you may be even more interested in learning how peephole style rear iron sights almost eliminate the dual sight alignment problem of goal-post style rear sights (as commonly found on pistols). The rear peep sight on rifles take advantage of actual "optical effects", without any glass -- much like a pinhole camera can actually magnify images without any lenses or mirror…
Palma competitors routinely hit out to 1000 yards with iron sights (in reality, aperture sights). They are extremely effective.
Re: Pistol sights
#9> I was told once by a proficient pistol shooter that he ignored where the front sight was on the target, and paid attention only to the alignment of the two sights relative to each other. Since he did in fact hit the target, is the "two sights" here the rear sight which has two posts, or the two sites as in front sight + rear sight? several pages of reading and then .. an ambiguously worded conclusion.
He means the front sight and rear sight.
Re: Pistol sights
#10I wonder if this is related to [Hyperfocal Distance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperfocal_distance), a concept familiar to many photographers. Roughly, if you focus on the background (infinity), the foreground would be blurry; and vice-versa. If you focus about ~1/3rd into the scene, you'd have everything in reasonably sharp focus.
Unlike camera lenses, our eyes can't easily focus on an arbitrary distance without an object being present there. Perhaps the front sight is working as an approximation of the hyperfocal distance.