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Straining your eyes will not really harm them either though. It's a bit of a myth that goes back at least as far as spending too much time reading books and later on sitting too close to the TV and such. It's not the main cause though, plenty of people spent their youth doing very little close...

Well yeah, i suppose you could call the colour sort of 'pumpkin orange', though i'm not a big fan of naming colours really - just stating the wavelength is better and avoids confusion. This isn't often a problem, though some vendors keep calling 405 nm 'blue' which it definitely is not. Then...

Do you mean corrective optics that change the fast-axis divergence to get it close to the slow-axis by expanding the beam in one plane but not the other? Those are available, mostly as either sets of cylindrical lenses or prism pairs.

I think people get more disappointed than angry when it burns out at such high currents, especially when other people have operated them at the same current and their laser did not burn out quickly. Anything you do beyond the manufacturer spec is at your own risk: If the manufacturer states an...

Those aren't that bad at coupling heat down to a baseplate at all. Just remember they are not (any good) heatsinks themselves, but despite being fairly small can conduct quite a bit of heat to a baseplate or heatsink if made from proper aluminium. The set-screw design also allows you to get a...

Maybe, the problem could also be in the fan. Many such fans have a feedback wire that tells the actual RPM back to the motherboard. This serves several purposes, one of the is ability to tell if the fan is actually still turning and could possbibly turned down even further to reduce noise. It...

With photo's of monochromatic beams it's always a bit of 'what a camera makes of it'. This is unavoidable as such camera's are just not constructed for producing realistic monochromatic color rendering. I find the best way to deal with it is often to actually photoshop the image to the point...

I think the $11.99 ones will be the winners here, they look a lot like z-bolt heatsinks to me. Not only do they have a nice black anodized coating, they could also be bolted down to a larger heatsink or baseplate - afaik there are some threaded holes on the bottom to do so. The aixiz star...

Very nice color i must say. Considering the price tag it's a bit out of reach for now, but who knows, it may get more affordable in the future :)

Heatsinking certainly is interesting stuff - and as you found from the amazon models larger generally works better. It also has to do with the purpose they are designed for though: The cheapest one doesn't seem to be intended as a heatsink on it's on, just to provide thermal coupling to a...

Well, you don't need a spectromer to tell the wavelenght - you can do it with a know good grating and rulers. If you're not 100% sure about your grating you can test it if you have a laser of known wavelength. The upside there is that many of us actually do: All 532 nm DPSS lasers have a very...

He's probably getting his iphone camera replaced :D Just don't use expensive camera's when filming mucking about with lasers. The only exception could be when everything is securely mounted and you want to film a beamshow. In those cases you can run the show once with the lenscap on te camera...

As i understand the story they had the blue laser mounted on an automated tracking system such that it would point at the ISS indeed - and the idea was to use searchlights to point at the ISS to find out if they were able to be seen. The laser just guided them to the exact point in the sky to...

I'd say it would be hard to tell motives. I came across this video on youtube recently where some guy pointed a 5 watt blue straight into an old camera to see what it would record. Surprisingly the camera survived that reasonably well with only some burned out pixels. After that he proceeded...

I doubt it would matter much if we mean ND or OD here - the former referring to a 'gray' filter that blocks all wavelenghts and the latter referring to the wavelength of the laser used. I know what you mean by how this could be confusing, but the effect is so large it just really doesn't...

I think that experiment is fairly old by now, but yes they could see your laser, provided you had a means to actually point it at the ISS. An interesting experiment would be to do the opposite: take a laser pointer up there and try to shine it down onto a fixed point on the ground so people...

As for the naming of the colours of the goggles: I guess you could call 532-nm blocking ones 'orange' since their lenses usually have that color, and 660-635 ones 'blue' for the same reason. But i suppose it should be fairly clear to anyone in their right mind that you need to use goggles...

Well yeah, it can happen that a production run results in some diodes of somewhat different wavelength diodes. The question is what happens to them: The factory may see them as out of spec, rejects, and scrap them for recycling... or they somehow make it onto the market where they'll sometimes...

Those are burned through so quickly they offer no protection at all except from being grazed by a laser show that does audience scanning badly indeed. Another thing people sometime use are welding glasses. In theory those should work well, but if you get the automatic ones that only dim when...

Being submerged in water helps a great deal with cooling :) They also make flashlights and lasers to be used when diving or snorkeling, and pretty compact ones for the power too since water flow is an excellent way to get rid of heat. With waterproof flashlights there is often some kind of...