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I was looking up some laser information, stumbled across this site, and remembered that this is where I posted an insane self-experiment four years ago that I'm lucky to still have full eyesight after. In short, I looked directly into a 980 nm laser diode that was advertised as <5 mW (although...

Thanks for the replies! I took a look at Sam's Laser FAQ and noticed this comment: That's interesting, although I don't think it would explain the red I saw, since I used an IR-pass filter to get rid of <750 nm light for my second exposure. I still saw red, but not cyan. I've verified this...

I recently bought a fairly cheap 405 nm laser that claims to be 10 mW. Thing is, I can see the beam fairly clearly in dark, non-foggy conditions, and it makes a not uncomfortable but still bright spot on the wall. What power does it usually take to be able to see the beam of a 405 nm laser, and...

Yeah, I exposed myself to it longer than I intended, and I'm lucky it hasn't done anything noticeable. I'm certainly not going to play any more visual Russian Roulette. And by all means mention this at your school - as long as a random idiot from the internet is a good enough source! That gives...

Thanks everybody for putting up with my sheer recklessness. I'm happy to report that I did this and nothing bad happened. It showed up yesterday and I hooked it up to a couple of batteries. Then I took it to a dark room and shined it off the wall. Not surprisingly, I wasn't able to detect...

Yeah, that would be a good idea. The datasheets for the 940 nm LEDs I've looked up tend to show bandwidths of ~50 nm, but I didn't actually get any of those, just a cheap Radioshack one and of course the ones on remote controls. More than likely the intersection of the luminosity function and...

It's a dim, flickering red light. Seriously, you should try looking into remote control in a really dark room - you very well might see it, under good conditions.

It's a very dim red that blinks at different frequencies depending on what button you press. The blinking patterns are what communicates information to the TV. It's fun to point it at a digital camera while holding a button and then look at it with your eye. Some quirk of the digital camera...

Okay, okay, here's my motivation. I noticed that I can see the LED from remote controls - which should have a peak at 940 nm or so, but also a considerable bandwidth. I tested this as well on a LED I bought that is certainly a 940 nm LED; it's easily visible in the dark and glows a dim red. This...

Didn't exactly expect anybody to think this was a good idea, but believe it or not experiments of this sort have been done (Sliney et al basically tried this, and didn't hurt any of their subjects). But they obviously had much better equipment, and even a 5 mW laser appears that it would deal...

Thing is, I've looked up examples of vision damage from 650 nm lasers and it seems that the only way people have ever damaged their vision from those is by forcing their eyes open and staring at them for minutes on end, and even then literally every one of them recovered full vision within a few...

I've recently gotten into cheap lower-powered lasers, and I'm interested in the limits of human vision. To that end, I just bought a 5 mW 980 nm laser off the Internet. As I understand it, looking directly into lasers of that power for a time on the order of a few seconds should be fairly safe...