Please excuse the off-topicness of this post, but as a professional laser technician and user, I must chime in.
Although red or green pen sized lasers are sold and labeled to be less than 5mW, they are easily modified to have outputs up to 40mW or more. A 20mW laser (red or green) mounted as a finder on a telescope is an extremely dangerous thing that certainly could cause permanent eye damage if the scope is inadvertently bumped or otherwise pointed so that an eyeball could cross its path. Every laser user is morally and legally obligated to control their beam, whether the laser is a 5mW red collimation tool or a 50W green medical laser bought used on Ebay for the price of a Nagler eyepiece. Lasers are not toys. Diode pumped solid state lasers are flooding into our lives (thanks to Chinese manufacture) waaay faster than education regarding their safe and responsible use. The article linked here today (if true) about some knucklehead tracking an aircraft with a laser is just the beginning.
I hope the huge amateur astronomy community can be a voice of knowledge in this regard. We deal with optics, light and technology. We interact with the general public and use lasers when we do. Perhaps a few words of wisdom regarding laser light to those watching us collimate our scopes or pointing things out will pay off in the long run. It's just as good a practice as commenting on safety issues when observing the sun with a telescope in public.
Received on Wed Sep 29 21:10:19 2004