“Shooting is 70-percent science, and 30-percent magic.” The type of shooter you are dictates which elements end up in which category. Let’s imagine you have a big rifle match or a hunt coming up in a few days. You’ve been preparing your gear and equipment for weeks and have multiple trips to the range. You feel fully comfortable with your ballistic data and your bullet drop at a multitude of ranges and under various conditions.
Your financial — and perhaps even more important, time — investment to this point are what we can call substantial. If you were asked if you were comfortable removing your scope from your rifle right now, how would you feel? Would you be slightly annoyed, or would you be losing your mind? There’s so much involved in precision shooting that some elements tend to get put in the “magic” category. People don’t like to screw around with magic. They are aware of the fact that this thing exists, but they can’t fully quantify its existence and they certainly can’t explain why it happens.
This is the “magic” part of shooting. And it’s different for each shooter, but it’s what is most often blamed on a missed shot, a botched stage, or a ruined hunt — it’s that which we don’t understand. For those of you in which optics fall into that magical realm, allow me to try and pull the curtain back enough to expose the wizard.
“THERE IS NOTHING MAGIC ABOUT TELESCOPES … IT IS JUST A SH*TLOAD OF SCIENCE, BABY.”
—GALILEO, Probably
OPTICAL THEORY: ABBREVIATED
To break it down to easily digestible chunks, we can consider the optical paradigm as three distinct portions: What is happening in front of the scope, between the front(objective) and rear(ocular) lenses, and what happens behind it.
Visible spectrum radiation (light) is gathered through the front of our scope and is relayed through a series of refractive lenses to be displayed as a two-dimensional image to our eye. In between those lenses, we have a reticle superimposed on this image via engraving on a lens that we use to relate this image to three-dimensional space by way of
