Seeing your Infrared Laser

[Shalym]

Can you see an 1064nm 220mW Infrared Laser beam with night vision?

[planters]

You can easily see this with a standard CCD camera, even a web cam, as long as there is no IR blocking filter. If this is present you can remove it so that the bare CCD is visible. This will degrade the visible light performance because the low cost imaging lens is not color corrected for both wavelengths. I use a security camera that is called an "IR" camera that I equipped with a lens from the manufacturer which is color corrected for both the near IR and visible. These cameras are identical to the kind that are sold with arrays of IR diodes surrounding the camera for near field illumination. If the camera is equipped with an output that is compatible with a television monitor then you can feed the output directly to this screen and no computer is required. I set this camera on a small tripod in the lab and watch the monitor as I align 1064nm, 808nm and 532nm beams of a laser. You can see uW of power.

[VDX]

... in clear air the beam is mostly invisible, but you can see the spot very well with a common digicam as palish mauve.

Viktor

[mixedgas]

1064 is right at the edge of where Silicon CCD and Photodiode sensors start to loose response in a serious way. It will work, but keep in mind if a CCD sees it, there is considerable power there.

This page has a graph at the bottom that shows a typical curve:

http://www.gitthailand.com/Lighting_...ine_Vision.php




Steve

[Draco]

i tend to use a nightvison monocular (mo so when looking for "weeds" out side at night but we wont cover that skill set, another camera i use is a Microsoft life cam, it's 720p and the in filter is very easy to pop off, info on the web on that and i then took a 1cm square ir filter for a green dpss laser i got from ebay and glued it to the outer bezel of the life cam so i pop it in our out, kinda cheap but it works for my needs and shows the ir spill from a green dpss laser very well, the Crystalaser 25mw i use i took the cover off and the ir spill over loaded the camera to a degree, i was rather surprised by that as it's only a 25mw laser, so i am guessing the ir power is many 100's of mw in power, oddly it's ir diode mounts almost like a C-mount but the beam would be parallel with the mounting rather then at a 90 degree like a normal C-mount, i hope to keep it running for a while because of the available diode even though i don't remember the mounting type

[VDX]

... I have the binocular night-vision optics from a German tank, what's driven with 12V and pretty sensitive for the NIR range -- have plans to use it as adjusting/targeting device for my IR-lasers.

Tested it successfully with 810nm and 975nm ... will do this by time with 1064/1070nm too ...

Viktor