What are Ghost Ring Sights?
- Thread starter D-Rock
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- Somewhere on the Hudson Bay Coast
That's because you are looking at the rear sight. Concentrate on the front sight, and the target will be in focus. If you swing a shotgun on a goose, does the goose go out of focus? Same thing if you use a ghost ring or peep rear sight, because you look through them not at them. Front sight on target, press, bang, hit!
Nope..I'm focusing on the front sight. It's crystal clear and the target is blurry. Thats with open sights on a handgun, rifle, aperture sites on a rifle. With a shotgun and skeet I focus on the skeet and point the shotgun at it.
- Location
- Somewhere on the Hudson Bay Coast
Sounds like you need to scope all your guns so that the sight reticle and target appear on the same focal plane and are therefore both in focus. Seriously though, the only thing I can conclude is that your aperture is too far from your eye causing you to treat it like a normal rear sight. When you look through a ghost ring you should be almost unable to see it. If you can see it clearly it cannot work as intended, and therefore your target will blur.
- Location
- Somewhere on the Hudson Bay Coast
agilent_one said:
When pistol shooting, or shooting a rifle with a rear sight mounted in front of the action this is absolutely correct. When shooting with an aperture rear sight which is mounted behind the action you again concentrate on the front sight, ignore the rear sight, and the target will be in focus.
I've been shooting with aperture sights for years (13 years with the Army) and know how they work.Boomer said:
My point is...you can't have the front sight in clear sharp focus and the target as well.
if you are shooting at 50 yards you can see the front sight and target clearly at the same time?
- Location
- Somewhere on the Hudson Bay Coast
Striker said:
I've been shooting a hell of a lot longer than that! Three of my guns are fitted with ghost ring rear sights and a post front sights, and I have owned several others similarly sighted. When shooting, I look through the aperture, but am scarcely aware of it, I concentrate on the front sight and the target and I find both in focus. I don't know what else I can tell you. I guess we'll just have to settle for the fact that what applies for one individual is not necessarily universal.
Boomer said:
Boomer, what is your uncorrected vision? (not a smart-ass comment) When one hits that wonderful age when close-up vision starts to deteriorate, sometimes it can deteriorate to where the front sight looks like its as sharp as the target because they're both equally blurry? It's physically impossible to have two different objects at two distances in focus at the same time. Ask any optomestrist or opthomologist.
Ghost ring sights on handguns have been a fix for aging eyes for quite a few years; they are usually used with a larger and/or brighter front sight, such as you have. The front sight is big enough/bright enough for the eye to pick up and center in the ghost ring while focusing on the target, thus allowing people who need glasses for short focus to shoot without them.
Please don't take this post the wrong way, it is not intended as an insult.
- Location
- Somewhere on the Hudson Bay Coast
The human eye has a very long depth of field. This means that we can see objects a different distances without shifting our focus. What we cannot do is focus on three objects at different distances, but two we seem to be able to manage. Open sights are impossible to have in focus if the target is in focus. Conversely, keeping the target and the front sight in focus is not difficult with a ghost ring. Don't believe me though - Jeff Cooper taught this for years at Gun Site.
As to my own shooting, I can keep all my shots on a 12" 200 yard steel target off hand, but that is about my limit with a ghost ring. Given a large enough target I am sure I could manage 300 rested, but I don't practice at longer ranges with metallic sights.
As to my own shooting, I can keep all my shots on a 12" 200 yard steel target off hand, but that is about my limit with a ghost ring. Given a large enough target I am sure I could manage 300 rested, but I don't practice at longer ranges with metallic sights.
Boomer said:
I'm very familiar with ghost rings myself, having used them for some 16 years.
Yes, you can SEE objects at different distances without shifting your focus (ie. peripheral vision), but they won't all be in focus, only the object you happen to be looking at.
Have you been to Orange Gun Site and studied under Cooper? Have you personally heard him say that you can keep both the front sight and target in focus at the same time? I'm not trying to be a smat ass here, I'd just be very surprised if he did say this, that's all - it would go against his writings, that's all.
I myself never made the pilgrimage to Orange Gun Site, but I have been a fan of Cooper's writings for some 20 years. I have several of his books, and many of his articles in which he describes the method of using ghost ring sights, and have watched one video in which he describes the ghost ring. In all of them, he flatly states that it is not physically possible for the human eye to focus on more than one object at a time. The closest he comes to your argument is on page 33 of "Art of the Rifle: Special Color Edition", copyright 2002 in which he writes "With the open sight, the shooter must try to view three points at once: his rear sight, his front sight, and his target. This is is not physically possible, due to the focusing capactiy of the eye, but approximations (italics mine) can be achieved.".
"Approximations" doesn't equal both front sight and target in focus at the same time. I would suggest that if both your front sight and target are equally in focus, that niether one is in focus, but rather both are equally out of focus. Naturally, the longer one's sight radius, the closer the target and front sight could seem to be near focused together, but both still wouldn't be focused at the same time.
The nice thing about a ghost ring is that you can forget about having to consciously align the front sight with a blurry rear notch, while putting the in focus front sight on a blurry target. All you have to worry about is putting the in-focus front sight on the somewhat blurry target.
I well remember reading in Cooper's Corner about a ghost ring sight that Lewis Awerbuck started using on his pistol. Cooper described how this type of sight on a pistol my very well prove to be the saviour of the aging eye because with a bright front sight and a large aperture, one could focus on the target and the eye's natural ability to center objects (in this case a front sight that is unable to be focused on anyway) in the aperture allowed one to now put a blurry front sight on the center of mass of a target and achieve acceptable combat accuracy.
Boomer said:
Boomer, if you can truly see your front sight and target both in focus at the same time, you have the only set of eyes in the history of mankind to be able to do so. Like I said, ask any optometrist or opthomoligist if it's possible. The human eye can only focus on one focal plane at one time, not two.
And your last comment about both front and rear sights being in focus on a pistol is off, too. Even on something with as short a sight radius as a pistol, both sights will not be in focus at the same time. If they appear equally focused, then your "mid-ranging" between the two, and accuracy will suffer. That's why it is so imperative to focus on the front sight, and front sight only.
Pages 105 through 108 actually support the fact that you can't focus on the front sight and target at the same time; bottom of pg.108 after describing the ghost ring and comparing same to scopes:
"When seen in the glass, the aiming index or 'reticle' isn't in the same focal plane as the target, obviating the necessity for the shooter to switch his focus back and forth from one point to another."
ie. switching the focus back and forth between the front sight and the target, as we all know both cannot be equally in focus at the same time.
Again, I've been studying Cooper's writings for a long time, and I'd be very interested to know where he's stated that two objects at two different distances can be in focus at the same time. Can you give a specific reference?
- Location
- Somewhere on the Hudson Bay Coast
jaycee said:
Ahh where to start . . . . Well if we visit page 112 of "To Ride, Shoot Straight, and Speak the Truth" we find that open pistol sights can almost be held in one focus because the sights are close together , but held far from the eye. One might expect when all we can see is the rifle's front sight on the target it could only be sharper.
I suspect you have some training as an optometrist, or at the very least you have put the question to some one with that training, but let's play a little game. We generally estimate distance by the size of an object against it's background, or compared to another object of a known size in our view. A front sight out on the end of a rifle barrel is far enough away from our eye that it not in near range focus. Once an object is in far range focus it does not matter how far it it - for example the tree you see in front of the mountain is in focus just as the mountain is. But when a mosquito flies close to your face, if you focus on it, both the tree and the mountain loose their focus. The front sight on a rifle is far enough away that your brain does not say oh, it's only half an inch high so I must not be able to see it in focus. No - if you look through your aperture at the front sight your brain cannot range it because it cannot differentiate between it and the background. For all your brain knows, that front sight is a gigantic post 100 feet high out in the distance - or thousands of miles tall if put against the moon.
