I got this sweet green laser pointer from my friend Ben. They're made in China, and the nice label on on the side says the power out put is less than 5 mW. Turns out that light meters designed to test medical lasers show these things as putting out between 50-100mW of light! Placing a filter that only allows the 532nm green light to pass reduces the indicated output to 20-30mW.... still way over the 5mW it's rated for. It's likely that the light thas being filtered out is ultra violet 1064nm (invisible). Which would suggest that this UV component of the emitted light is 20-80mW of power... with a little patience you might be able to sunburn your email password into your skin so you stop forgetting it.
This thing is dangerous, but lots of fun to play with.
Hi self. Awesome post. I think I should write a comment.
ReplyDeleteThe picture was a 20second exposure at ISO 1600 and f/20. It was pretty noisy, but I used a blur filter on the picture before uploading to clean it up.
What would happen if you tried an HDR effect to photograph the laser beam?
ReplyDeleteIf I played around with it a bit, I could make it look a lot prettier for sure. I was in a hurry when I did that shot. I would also need to turn on the camera's built-in long exposure noise reduction feature.
ReplyDelete