The elephant in this room might hide buff, too

Description:

“. . . the most dangerous thing in elephant hunting is often not the elephant you’re shooting but other elephant you may not even be aware of. The tunnel vision that is part and parcel of shooting with a scope can get you killed . . .” (‘Safari Rifles II’ by Craig Boddington, p422)

Craig was right, at least in terms of scopes made since ‘Safari Rifles II’ (2009) was published. But though he analysed rifles for Africa and their histories seven ways to Sunday over 594 pages, scopes got the short-back-and-sides, with little about their evolution. And though ‘tunnel vision’ can indeed hide elephants, grumpy buffalo and lions might also be found in groups.

Had Boddington dared to criticise modern optics, he might have mentioned that things used to be different, that once it was possible to buy a new scope that showed no more tunnel vision than a ghost-ring aperture.

Though even two magnifications can hide acres of countryside, it was once possible to have 1x scopes that hid almost nothing at all, yet put the target and aiming means in the same focus.

Add any magnification and heaps of horizon must disappear, of course – in modern scopes, roughly equal to the scope’s field of view multiplied by the power. In area terms we can lose acres and hectares.

So why does that black ‘tunnel vision’ really matter?

Well, apart from forming psychological blinkers, it can sometimes cover up more area than you can see through the scope, with or without what is lost to magnification.

"You do the math!"

Even on that tunnel-visioned Nikon picture h/w (and we've seen worse), I measure the diameter of the rubber eyepiece on my computer screen as being 210mm and that of the 'field of view' is 147mm. My calculations say that the bigger radius of 105mm gives an area of 34636.06 square millimetres and that the field of view (radius 73.5) covers 16971.66891 sq.mm. Subtracting the FoV from the eyepiece-plus area, I get 17664.3911 sq.mm, meaning the eyepiece and the black field stop visible inside it cover fractionally more area than the field of view.

('LIGHT AT THE START OF THE TUNNEL' shows even better ways to evaluate such matters in real field-of-view terms, of course, but the above numbers show a simple truth you can check on your own screen, whatever its size. The numbers will vary but the relationships should be much the same.)

The heavy image-movement field stops that started the tunnel-vision problem in 1957 can also shrink the scope’s field of view, a serious matter when so much vision has already been lost and the outer world is so far away. That Nikon scope at 4x, for instance, has a field of view of less than 26 feet - a long way from the 35 feet at 100 yards of Leupold's pre-1961 4x scopes.
- SBM

'LIGHT AT THE START OF THE TUNNEL - Are rifle scopes off the rails?' (approx. A5, 152pp, incl. 28 colour pages) traces the descent of modern riflescopes from their golden age after WWII through the dubious 'advances' seen since.

The $20 price, plus $4.30 postage, includes 24 pages of additional information to be sent by email; other options with additions printed: $30-$45 posted.

The tear-out h/w is badly enlarged from p422 of ‘Safari Rifles II’ by Craig Boddington (Safari Press, 2009), shown for review. The tunnel-vision photo looks into a 2010 Nikon Monarch 4-16x42; the back-cover scope view is a reticle-movement 1960s B. Nickel Supralyt 1x12.