Rifle Scope
If you are in the market for a rifle scope, knowing what you need to look out for is daunting, especially if you have never purchased a scope before. The rifle scope that you select often determines whether or not you can make a humane kill when you are hunting. As many hunters are concerned with humane, quick, and accurate kills, your scope must be chosen with a great amount of care.
Before you purchase a rifle scope, you need to have a basic understanding of how they work. In the most simplest of terms, a rifle scope is a pair of tubes with lenses in the tubes. The lenses magnify and distort light, while the tubes control and maintain the image. This allows you to see much further than you could with just your eye, permitting you to target an animal much more accurately than if you were attempting to fire without a scope. The higher the quality of the rifle scope, the higher the accuracy and further distance the scope can be used for.
If you are considering whether or not to purchase a rifle scope, you may need more than one scope to handle your needs. There is no one scope that will suit every type of hunting. Squirrel hunting, for example, uses a different range of scope than deer hunting. Deer hunting can use several different styles of scope dependent on where you are hunting your deer at. Dense woods hunting, as an example, uses a less powerful scope than open country hunting. This is due to the fact that you need less of a range in a dense forest than you would on open, rolling plains. A rifle scope that magnifies too far will be a disadvantage for those in the forest, and can strain your eyesight.
Hunting rifle scopes tend to come in different magnifiers, ranging typically between 1.5x up to 18x. These numbers are a reference to how many times the image is magnified when you look through the scope. Squirrel hunting, as an example, is usually done with a scope that can magnify up to 4x. As most squirrel hunting is done in dense forest, using a scope stronger than this can result in less than successful hunting trips. With 4x magnification, the image you see through the scope is four times larger than what your eye can see.
Once you have purchased your rifle scope, you need to make certain that you have the right connecting rings for your scope. Be careful of the diameter of your scope, and ensure the ring is the correct size. A poorly fitted scope will be inaccurate. In addition to this, an incorrectly mounted scope is likely to be damaged through use, resulting in expensive repairs needing to be done before the scope can be used again.