Sight Pictures!

[GRV]

When we resume....

I'm curious what your process is for tracking the front sight in recoil. I'm having a hard time imagining how to do that without breaking target convergence.

[Mr_White]

Tracking the front sight just means paying mental attention to it while it is moving up and down in recoil, not following it with our eyes (convergence.) The eyes would stay pointed at (convergence) the target spot the whole time. The quality of our mental awareness of the front sight, as we watch it move up and down in recoil, is pretty heavily influenced by how visible the front sight is in the present lighting conditions and with the target as the background, and whether we have the additional visual acuity allowed by seeing the front sight sharp and clear instead of blurry (accommodation.)

[Holmes375]

Tracking the front sight just means paying mental attention to it while it is moving up and down in recoil, not following it with our eyes (convergence.) The eyes would stay pointed at (convergence) the target spot the whole time. The quality of our mental awareness of the front sight, as we watch it move up and down in recoil, is pretty heavily influenced by how visible the front sight is in the present lighting conditions and with the target as the background, and whether we have the additional visual acuity allowed by seeing the front sight sharp and clear instead of blurry (accommodation.)

I like the XS Big Dot front sight for this kind of application. Admittedly I have used this sight system for quite a while and have become accustomed to its size and shape. Its easy to keep track of the front sight without wandering from the focused point of aim.

I enjoy going out in the prairie late in the day and setting up quart size milk bottles and busting them at random as the sun goes down. The white golf ball sight does a pretty good job of it for my old eyeballs. I set them up in large ravines where I have a backstop on two sides. The I walk my Wyoming gauntlet Afterwards, I get my headlamp, let the dog out of the truck and we go do clean up.

If I ever get attacked by a murderous milk jug its toast

[GRV]

I'm still having a hard time achieving "Gabe-vision". I wonder if it has to do with my myopia. Ironically, without my glasses on, the front sight is roughly how far my relaxed eye can focus, so if I just target focus with no glasses I basically get a single blurry target and a double sharp front sight. However, with glasses on, it's a different story.

When I try to mimic the magic eye feeling, my vision very quickly goes double target. I can get a tiny bit of accommodation shift before that happens, but it won't hold still, it oscillates.

[Mr_White]

I'm still having a hard time achieving "Gabe-vision".

I'm really not convinced at this point that it's worth chasing 'Gabe-vision' very much. At least maybe not beyond figuring out whether it's already something you can do, or is easy to learn because your eyes and brain happen to work the same way as mine. More below.

When I try to mimic the magic eye feeling, my vision very quickly goes double target.

Magic Eye 3D pictures are seen by manipulating convergence, not accommodation. Maybe not very relevant if you are saying 'magic eye feeling' casually. But if you really mean the same feeling as when seeing Magic Eye 3D pictures, that is about convergence.

I can get a tiny bit of accommodation shift before that happens, but it won't hold still, it oscillates.

That sentence reads to me like you have the normal strong linkage between convergence and accommodation. I don't know whether you are wasting your effort to try to learn to run your vision like mine.

---

Trying not to rehash the whole lengthy and confusing vision discussion, but at this point I think there are several ways to use vision in iron-sighted pistol shooting, and they can all be made to work very well and support a very high level of shooting if practiced a lot.

I think the ideal is to be able to converge on the target and accommodate to the front sight, with both eyes open. This allows the most detail to be seen in the sights and thus align them most precisely, and allows the greatest field of view while 'in the sights.' Some people have the issue of it costing extra time to get the front sight sharp and clear. If they can shoot that way, even if it takes extra time, those people seem like likely candidates to try the at-will focal shift exercises that I describe in my vision paper to eliminate or reduce the time cost. If that doesn't work for them, maybe some exploration of target-focused shooting would be productive.

When there are problems with doubled targets or inability to get the front sight sharp and clear, I think people are well-served by trying:

Learning to shoot with both eyes open (using the time honored process of occluding the nondominant eye, progressively less over time.) I wouldn't chase that for forever though. At some point, I personally think it's fine to abandon both eyes open and simply close or squint the nondominant eye. That doesn't have to take any extra time, just like my accommodation/focal shift doesn't have to take any extra time. It is going to narrow the field of view while actually in the act of aiming the gun. Sometimes that might matter, lots of times it won't.

Practicing target-focused shooting. This is probably going to be aided by high visibility sights, especially the front sight, to maximize mental awareness of the sights even though they may be blurry. Maybe there will be loss of precision due to lack of fine enough awareness of the sights to align them very precisely. Maybe that can be overcome with extensive practice and experience at target-focused shooting. Even though I basically never target focus myself, I kind of want to play around with this and see how accurately I can shoot while target-focused.

All this stuff is why 'see what you need to see' is both the fullest and emptiest answer. But it is about the only answer that is only one sentence long.

[Sasage]

Does anyone have a pic of the orange tcap? Bonus points if it has a defoor rear!

[ssb]

I'm interested in trying a fiber optic sight after seeing this thread. I *think* .165" is the front sight height I need for a Defoor rear, but Ameriglo's catalog doesn't specify. Can anybody confirm the height needed?

[littlejerry]

I'm interested in trying a fiber optic sight after seeing this thread. I *think* .165" is the front sight height I need for a Defoor rear, but Ameriglo's catalog doesn't specify. Can anybody confirm the height needed?

That's correct.

[spinmove_]

I finally had a chance to put a green FO rod in the Dawson FO front that I have on hand. Results were interesting. I found that what I generally saw in photos didn't necessarily translate to what I saw in the real world. Generally speaking, while the green FO rod did seem to catch more light in more situations than the red FO rod, I found that most of those situations gave me a rather "yellow" fiber than green. Not only did this turn out dull, but it didn't really catch my eye all that well. I was still able to find many darkened situations indoors where I could have positively ID'd a threat, but not see my sights (blacked out rear, black serrated front FO) unless the background I was targeting was of sufficient contrasting color. So a threat with darker clothes standing in front of a darker wood door would have provided a not very visible situation for me. Now, another thing I did find interesting was how I installed the FO rod this time around. I usually would install the rod with a larger bulb on the front, but this time I made the bulb as small as possible while still maintaining solid fiber lock up. This resulted in a very sharp and focused fiber dot. I'll have to test this out with a red FO rod again. I think that would ultimately be my preferred FO setup if I were to ever go FO.

Contrasting those sights with a set that has a blacked out rear and a front with no tritium but some white marking of some kind did indeed give me a good positive sight picture that was very usable. While I understand that, again, there are pros and cons to every sight setup that is situationally dependent, I think for me and my eyes, I'm best served to at least have some sort of white marking on my front sight. I think my next sights are going to be black on black with a custom white stripe on the front, most likely in the form of some Defoors (despite my better judgement with some of the recent dealings that I've had with AmeriGlo's products recently). I also find that a solid white dot is much more visible than a small white ring around a tritium lamp, even in more transitional lighting where tritium starts to help out, but not quite. Obviously more experimentation is needed. Results should prove interesting.

This thread definitely has been eye-opening for me personally. Totally diggin' in.

[Holmes375]

A similar experience for me. I've been playing around with FOs, red and green, and a white ring tritium under subdued lighting. The FOs didn't do as well for me in reality as they do for a camera lens. I also found the contrast of a black rear and white front gave me the best results under more varied conditions. The Shield I was working with is now wearing a factory front white dot combined with a 10-8 U-notch serrated black rear. I'm really liking this combo.