Sight equipped with MicroSight
The sights, equipped with the latest optical system based on zone plates, will allow the shooter to simultaneously keep in focus both the front sight and a distant target.
Try to shoot a rifle at a target from, say, a hundred meters away. If you are not a professional, you are unlikely to fall into it at all. If a professional and even make an amendment to the wind, hitting the bull's-eye will be a great success.
The most difficult and most important thing when shooting is, of course, to aim correctly. Combining a distant target with a front sight is not an easy task, even from the point of view of optics. It is necessary to simultaneously keep attention on a distant (target) and a close (front sight) object, but the eye, like any other optical device, is unable to focus together on both. Either one or the other will be blurred.
Concentric zone plate rings keep distant and near objects in focus
To get rid of this seemingly insoluble problem will allow the MicroSight technology, which is being developed by the American engineer David Crandall. Its essence is to install a tiny, coin-sized, transparent disk on the weapon on the line of sight, allowing the shooter's eye to keep both distant and close objects in focus at the same time. And the main secret is, of course, in the disc itself.
David Crandall is a keen shooter trying to hit a target from 100 meters using his new scope
It is nothing more than a Fresnel zone plate, a glass disc consisting of a set of concentric circles of strictly defined diameters. This zone plate acts almost like a lens, although the principle is different. In an ordinary lens, light rays are refracted due to the difference in the speed of light inside it and in the air, and the Fresnel lens works due to diffraction, i.e. changes in the direction of the beam when passing through an obstacle or hole, the dimensions of which are comparable to its wavelength.
Crandall proposed using a zone plate, consisting of a set of glass rings, transparent and translucent. Light passes through the transparent rings unchanged, allowing you to focus on distant objects. Diffraction occurs at the boundaries of the semitransparent rings, focusing light from nearby objects. As a result, the main thing is obtained: the ability to simultaneously clearly see both a distant target and a close front sight.
Of course, there are also alternative scopes today. But most of them are complex devices, often (like holographic sights) requiring even electronic components. In comparison, MicroSight looks very inexpensive, simple and reliable, although not as accurate. And reliability and simplicity are sometimes much more important than accuracy.
