Comment by electrograv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by electrograv | Hacker News Reader

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If you're interested in the science behind this, you may be even more interested in learning how peephole style rear iron sights almost eliminate the dual sight alignment problem of goal-post style rear sights (as commonly found on pistols).

The rear peep sight on rifles take advantage of actual "optical effects", without any glass -- much like a pinhole camera can actually magnify images without any lenses or mirrors at all.

By simply providing an arbitrarily small "aperature" you're looking through in the rear, the front-rear sight alignment problem is not only capped at an upper bound of error (defined by the peephole size and sight radius), but the actual error from front-rear sight misalignment is visually magnified and centered through a fixed viewing point, making it vastly easier to keep the actual error near zero.

So generally, to achieve precision within the (small) upper bound of error with a peephole sight, all you need to do is place the front sight post on the target when looking through the rear peep sight. Even better precision is made much easier via a sort of "peephole camera" effect through the aperature of the rear sight.

When I shot competitively (rifle in HS, almost 30 years ago) I was a big fan of the double peephole sights. All you had to do was center the target in the aperture and make sure the aperture was circular.

Takes all the work out of sight alignment and then you can focus on breathing, heartbeat and trigger squeeze.

I did the same kind of competition, and the double-aperture sights were, indeed very effective and effortless to use. There's a catch though: they're only good for shooting circular targets of the correct apparent size.

I actually did once use a rifle with such sights to take some small game. It was not easy to aim outside of the conditions for which it was designed.

I think it depends in large on the type of shooting. I didn't have a problem with double peeps for man-shaped targets, but acquisition is harder due to the limited field of view.

The military style peep + blade is a good compromise I think, especially when have to worry about ranging.

Another option is to use a red dot sight and leave the front iron sight up. This has the combination of fast target acquisition, better situational awareness and mitigating parallax. I just saw this demonstrated yesterday at Sig Sauer Academy and was pretty impressed.

This is called co-witnessing

Palma competitors routinely hit out to 1000 yards with iron sights (in reality, aperture sights). They are extremely effective.

Palma rifles don't have post front sights. They use adjustable front and rear apertures. You still generally focus on the front sight. All you do with the rear is center up the front in the rear and the target is blurry but centered in the front one. This is the same for really any distance from 50 feet up to 1000 yards. And yes, I have been involved in those competitions.

The hard part is having a solid hold and body control, reading the wind, and having super consistent ammunition that you intimately know all the elevation adjustments for. The remainder is how much money you spent on your barrel and how many rounds it has down it. A tight shooting coat helps a great deal, too.

I got bored with the whole thing when it occurred to me that I was just throwing money at barrels and other gear. Not to say that the game isn't highly competitive, but like auto racing, it's a money thing. Similar to many such pursuits, to take it to the max you will pretty much end up divorced.

I switched to target archery for similar reasons. Archery is far less about the bow and far more about technique. With olympic-style recurve and bare-bow shooting, it seems like there's always more to learn--it never gets boring!

And if you want to throw some money into the bow, you can put together the same bow that Olympic shooters are using for about $2000. The compound bows you see on the World Cup circuit are a bit more, perhaps $3000. Keep in mind that's for very top-end gear. (See [1] for examples of what I'm talking about.)

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/user/archerytv

How does bullseye/precision pistol compare? I would like to compete eventually, and I'd hope that how much money you can spend is less of a deciding factor than skill.

I would presume the tradeoff here is slower acquisition - if you're not on target, it likely requires more brainpower to _get_ on target. With goalpost sights, it's far easier to be misaligned, but you can't "lose" the target. (disclaimer - I've never used a peephole sight, so this is all speculation on my part!)

I find myself actually getting superior accuracy with small aperture sights than with a standard 1 or 2 moa holographic or red dot sight. There is a bit of a "magnification" effect with a small rear aperture that seems to assist with accuracy.

You can have peep sights on a bow too - it mounts on the string

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