I am new to this forum so excuse my lack of laser knowledge. I am not intersted in burning stuff or laser special effects. I have an application where I want to uniformly illuminate a circular area approximately ten feet in diameter using a continuous wave laser. I would like to start my experiments down at 808nm and work up in wavelength. I have extremely sensitive CCD cameras that have a high Quantum Efficiency from 450nm- 1100nm. In my application, I am mainly interested in the 808nm - to 940nm NIR band. I plan to be approximately from a minimum of 100 feet to a maximum of 12 miles from my target. I must be able to collimate the beam so it is a plain and even focus with diameters from 5 feet to 200 feet at the target. My camera is very sensitive to NIR and I can take images solely using the reflected NIR light. Any ideas? I can send a video to anyone showing how another person achieved the same goal. I have video but don't know how they did it. They used an 808nm CW laser at no more than 1 watt. They were able to illuminate an area at 14 miles observable by the camera at night. Any ideas out there. It should be eyesafe at the huge target diameters. Also people would not notice any red flash from the laser since the sensitivity of the human eye at 808nm is very low compared to my camera. I am not using range gated lasers. My camera has a nominal .00002 lux sensitivity. I have learned that I can actually see intense IR light up to 880nm. Most people dont see much above 700nm, but that is if the light is not intense. The brighter the light, the greater in wavelength (lower in frequency) human can see. Most of my experiments with non-laser light are from 800nm - 1300nm. I have other friends who have been working with 40 watt 808nm lasers but only greater volume (a "cube" of bright 808nm light 50 yards by 50 yards by 12 feet) and less range than the 1 watter. I must be able to have a duty cycle a mimimum of 60 minutes at a time. Of course it would be better for 100% duty 24 hours per day, but I must start somewhere. I am familiar with dichroic and dye based hot mirrors as well as fresnel lenses for beam shaping.
Floordog
Floordog
