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Cameras for spotting?

pewpewfever

Spineless Peon
Full Member
Minuteman
Mar 31, 2019
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DFW
I have a Nikon camera with 60x optical zoom and I have thought about trying it out as a spotting scope. I realize that it wouldn’t be 3D club material, but is there any reason it wouldn’t work fairly well?
 
I have a Nikon camera with 60x optical zoom and I have thought about trying it out as a spotting scope. I realize that it wouldn’t be 3D club material, but is there any reason it wouldn’t work fairly well?
Here's a couple photos using a 30x optical on a Nikon 9700s. Took those just beyond the 1000 yard disc on the Koyukuk from moose camp.
 

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Here's a couple photos using a 30x optical on a Nikon 9700s. Took those just beyond the 1000 yard disc on the Koyukuk from moose camp.

I have the point and shoot Nikon B700. It has been really easy to use and takes 4K video. I mostly use it for pictures of the moon, as I haven’t figured out yet how to make it focus on planets and constellations.

FD9E9F49-EBB4-4721-8962-24D34AF3FE6F.jpeg
 
There is math for this and with a 127mm objective and an image sensor with optimally sized pixels, a 6.5mm hole could be resolved at 1,000 yards but there are "seeing" issues and you would really need astronomy style image stacking or lucky image techniques to return accurate hit location data.

A point and shoot just isn't going to have that but it might be nice at 100 yards+.
 
There is math for this and with a 127mm objective and an image sensor with optimally sized pixels, a 6.5mm hole could be resolved at 1,000 yards but there are "seeing" issues and you would really need astronomy style image stacking or lucky image techniques to return accurate hit location data.

A point and shoot just isn't going to have that but it might be nice at 100 yards+.

Even top of the line spotting scopes don’t have a 127mm objective, as far as I know. So how does that work?
 
Every telescope has an Airy circle which is the minimum angular feature size that can be resolved in a diffraction limited scope and that can be related to the pixel size on an imaging sensor at prime focus.

In perfect conditions it could locate a 6.5mm bullet hole within about 3.25mm in the equations for a 127mm scope with the sensor I was considering, 1,500mm focal length and about a 1.3 megapixel global shutter monochrome sensor.

That's not exactly the spec you see in a point and shoot camera.

I wanted to use an Nvidia Shield to do the image processing and almost had a machine vision guy on the hook for software. Unfortunately the project stalled.
 
I tried using a 600mm lens on a Nikon D200 and while able to spot trace in a recorded video played back on a monitor, in real time looking through the viewfinder it was difficult to see anything except an occasional splash.
 
So I guess the spotting scopes aren’t limited by a sensor? The human eye can see the impact at 1000+?
 
No, I'm talking about the bullet hole, not splash.