20W's of 532nm, wow!

[BowtieGuy]

Encap, thank you you for the lesson on the history of the Guide Star system; very informative!
I wasn't aware of exactly how or why the Guide Stars are used. The last link explained their purpose very well, ...and in plain english.
:thanks:

I didn't really need a Mini Cooper anyway.

 

[Radim]

Tough question, but I think I'll have to side with Encap on this; 1W of 589nm for the win! :wave:
Who else would have their own personal Guide Star laser? Group Buy anyone? :crackup:

Group buy? I'm in!

 

[CurtisOliver]

Interesting Encap. I sure would like my own LGS.

 

[Benm]

I have a few lasers in the 3W range, and at that point it gets pretty insane unless you have a beamdump or something. It burns everything I put in front of it pretty much...

At that power level you might want to get something to stop the beam indeed. They sell nice black bricks that do a good job at this.

I must admit i have some bun holes in the wallpaper and drapes here from lasers though, just being careless and not minding where the light goes while protected by safety goggles.

At one point i was adjusting a 445 that was poiting against white wallpaper and i wondered where the smoke came from. At first i thought something in the driver was overheating or something like that, but it turned out it was wallpaper smoldering away in the beam, after in managed to char it a bit that becomes quite good at absorbing blue light.

The drapes have holes in them from when the first powerful blurays came to market though

 

[ultimatekaiser]

Yeah I've had my fair share of oops moments too. Though rarely. I do remember one time we had a pulsed 32W green go off with no beam dump...nobody was ready for it and it ended up making a pretty nice deep black hole in the wall a few times. I did it with my 3W green once at home. It was a pain to fix.

Our dump is a sinked and recessed graphite disc. Or a folded black metal plate.

 

[Alaskan]

I'm becoming obsessed with 589nm, gotta find a way to make power there