Picking A Rifle Scope

Dating back to the late 1830's, rifle scopes have been helping people improve their aim for over a hundred years. Hunters, target shooters and plinkers alike have all seen the benefits of using a good rifle scope. While choosing a scope used to be a fairly simple process, advances in technology have made choosing the correct scope for your type of shooting a somewhat difficult proposition.

The first thing you see when looking through a scope is the reticle, also called the crosshairs. This pattern varies from scope to scope, as does the material the reticle is made from. Some scopes have the reticles etched directly into the glass, while others use wire or paint to place the reticle in the sight. Some reticles have dots in the middle, while others simply have a crosshair. There are even scopes that feature lighted dots in the middle. The ones with dots, lighted or otherwise, in the middle are ideal for close-range shooting, while the scopes with crosshairs work best for long-range shooting. Hunters that shoot long distances often find the scopes with dots cover too much of their target for them to get an accurate bead on it.

Almost as varied as the types of reticles are the types of lenses you can buy for your rifle scope. All lenses are made of glass, but they are coated with a number of different chemical coatings. The chemical coatings are put on the glass primarily to help reduce glare and reflection. Magnesium fluoride is a common coating, with more than one coating being applied to higher-end scopes. The additional coatings serve to further reduce glare and allow more light to get into the lens. Lenses with a high number of coatings produce a clearer and brighter image. Coated and fully coated lenses only have one layer of chemical coating, while multicoated and fully multicoated lenses have multiple layers. A fully coated lens is coated on all glass that touches the air.

Once you've decided on the crosshair type and the chemical coating, you then need to take into consideration the magnification you're going to want. The magnification number determines how much the scope is going to magnify your view. The magnification number is the first number you see in the scope power number. For example a 6X40 scope magnifies your view 6 times what you can see with your naked eye. Some scopes come with a variable magnification, meaning you can adjust how much the image is magnified based on how far you are away from the object you want to shoot.