First time shooting 500M (Pics)

aheppner

aheppner

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went out shooting for the last time of the season last week, I thought I'd try at 500M since I just chronographed my load and I could use ballistic chart to estimate bullet drop.

My bullet drop chart said 10.5 moa up about 61 in drop but my actuall was about 11.5 moa, my range was only an estimate cuz i dont have a range finder, i used my trucks trip meter, it shows .1 km so i drove till .5 km, im guessing that's why my elevation was a little off

as for the windage, i had no clue of the wind speed but it was windy, i had a big backboard so i could adjust windage as I went. I was center on the target at 4 moa windage left,

i put in my ballistic chart a 25km wind and it gave my 7 moa at 500M so i know it was less than that but i don't know exactly

how do you guys estimate wind speed, electronic meter? or just by experience?

well these were my groups, i didn't have wind flags so my horizontal dispersion is bad, i think a flag would help a lot

let me know what you think

Alex

edit:im shooting my savage .223



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Wind flags will help greatly your first 100m -300m concentrate your wind your wind reading in this zone. Leaves on trees, grass, fluff or bugs in the air could tell you direction and speed. If you could adjust the parallax on your scope to focus on the first few hundred meters to see if you can find mirages this will be one of your best indication for wind.

You got some vertical dispersion @ 500m this is a great test of consistent velocity your getting. It may need some tuning. Good stuff! Super fun shooting at that range. Keep it up.
 
Congrats on getting out and shooting your rifle at a decent distance. It sure is rewarding to see what you can do with your rifle, isn't it?

If you had real chrono data for your load (like you did), and you used the correct b.c. data for the bullet you used, the trajectory estimated by the ballistics program would have been within a quarter-MOA (i.e. a single scope click) at 500m.

Nothing wrong with measuring distance with your odometer, it'll certainly be correct to within 100m and depending on your technique it is possible to measure more accurately than that. The ~1MOA difference in the elevation you needed was probably cause you might have had a 40-50m measurement error. Another possibility is that the "minutes" on your scope might be a bit smaller or a bit bigger than they should be. I have one target scope, that is overall pretty decent, but its "minutes" are actually about 0.8MOA in size. Not a problem really, it is something you can work with and work around.

There are many different possible ways to estimate wind. All of them are fair game. A good way to learn wind reading is to do a lot of shooting. Taking up target rifle shooting, then shooting a dozen or two dozen days each year at distances from 300 yards to 1000 yards, is a good way to build up a "mental catalog" of what different wind strengths look like and how much they affect your bullet. If we were shooting together, that's what I would do - look at the various indicators available (flags if any, mirage, smoke, grass, trees), consider the distance that we're shooting, then make a S.W.A.G. on how much wind to put on for our first sighter. The majority of times I'll be decently close, and be in pretty good agreement with somebody using an accurate wind meter and set of charts (though there is always room for the occasional major embarrassment!! ;-).

A wind meter can be useful in order for you to speed up to process of "calibrating" your eyeballs to the various conditions you see. Then again, once you fire your first shot and you see where it has landed on the paper, you know exactly how much wind you *should* have used for *that* shot... that too ought to go into your mental catalog of what wind looks like and how much its worth.
 
thanks for the advice, i plan to get a lot more long range shooting in next season, I will try and prefect my reloading for next year, i think i got it pretty good but i need a benchrest seating die, a case mic, and a bullet comparator.

just ordered those tools so i should have my run-out and seating depth a little better
 
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