Visibility of the laser

Hi!

On big aspect of having a laser at all for me is, to watch the beam, or the dot when you draw circles for example, on walls or other surfaces!

With a < 5mW laser that should not be a problem I guess!

But when handling a more powerful laser it is neccessary to always wear your eyeprotect, especially indoors!

Same for lighting matches or burn some stuff with a high power laser.

The only thing I can imagine is to videotape that with a camera and watch it afterwards, since you will not be able to see it with your saftey glasses on the way you can watch it on youtube for example!

Or is there any other way to actually "see" the laser when you handling it?


Greetings brunes01

Do note that lasers on videos don't necessarily look the same as they look to your eyes, especially those at the edge of the visible spectrum.


This is a 405nm laser recorded with a phone, totally different than if you had seen it by your own eyes.

Hi!

So how do they record all the videos on youtube?

Are they using special filters for their cams? What about 532nm green or 445nm blue ones? Are these visible like to the naked eye when being videotaped?

In these videos the beam always looks excellent or even "better" than with your eyes!

Greetings brunes01

Those should be fine, the most problematic ones are those at the extreme ranges of human sensitivity because cameras are also sensitive to near IR (if you have a cheap camera you can try removing the ir filter and you'll be able to see through some clothes) and UV.

Smoke helps a lot, I'm not sure if anyone else does it differently, But I just use my normal camera... I think it would have something to do with intensity of the laser at the dot.

532nm beam shot from Mars Phoenix Lander LIDAR: Catalog Page for PIA11030 on Mars.

"A laser beam from the Canadian-built lidar instrument on NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander can be seen in this contrast-enhanced sequence of 10 images taken by Phoenix's Surface Stereo Imager on July 26, 2008, during early Martian morning hours of the mission's 61st Martian day after landing.

The view is almost straight up and includes about 1.5 kilometer (about 1 mile) of the length of the beam."

Hi!

I gave it a try today!

Beam was photographed without flash with my Casio Ex-F1.

Light in the room was not dark but dimmed.

Greetings brunes01