scope talk for low light

No. What if that exact same scope had magnification printed in half increments. Same scope but they just printed the numbers on the magnification ring to include half steps - so it's 14 steps instead of 7 but the same scope, same magnification range. Would the optimum low light setting now change because there are 14 steps?

Here's the real formula: The least magnification will always provide the clearest picture in low light settings.

Think about it this way: The goal is to gather as much light and get as much light to your eye as possible. We see things because light bounces off of things toward our eye.

The light bouncing off a whole barn is much more than the light bouncing off of one nail in the side of that barn. At low magnification, you can see the whole barn - and all of the light reflecting off of the whole barn. At high magnification, you only see one little nail head - and only the little bit of light light bouncing off of that one little nail head.

Higher magnification = smaller area of reflected light that is visible = less light gathered = darker image.
Lower magnification = larger area of reflected light that is visible = more light gathered = brighter image.

This is why microscopes have powerful lights to illuminate the tiny, tiny things your looking at under very high magnification.

Want as bright an image as possible? You need to gather as much light as possible. Choose the scope with the largest objective lens. Bigger lenses gather more light because they are...bigger.

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scope talk for low light