Not the point. Green is picked up the most by the human eye. You can get a 445nm, 405nm, 638nm or even 660nm that you can see the beam but since the eye doesnt pick up those colors as well, they dont look as bright, thus not altering your night vision as much
Trust me, I build and sell lasers. Green lasers are good for rookie astronomers or people trying to point out things to someone who doesn’t know what they are looking at but if you are attaching it to a telescope then green is not the wavelength you want
Agreed, not for telescope attachment but used primarily as you say, for pointing out items to people not familiar with the sky as part of lectures. An awful lot of the local astronomy club’s activities are with local schools and other public outreach activities at local and state parks and similar locations. For that type of use you need ready visibility.
One study from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Maryland showed that one $15 pointer kicked out 10 times more IR light than green light — enough to damage the eye before a blink response.
99% of people are uninformed when it comes to lasers. Funny part is that the eye can take a lot more IR light then visible light before damage occurs. IR disperses more over the eye than say 532nm thus it can take a higher amount HOWEVER I DONT RECOMMEND IT and personally I use safety glasses whenever indoors
… a simple way for anybody to detect these infrared emissions.
The method is to reflect the the beam off a standard CD which acts as a diffraction grating, and so separates light of different wavelengths. The diffracted light is reflected onto a piece of paper which displays the diffraction pattern. Many webcams are sensitive to infrared light or can be easily modified to detect it. So photographing the paper using such a camera shows the diffraction pattern of the green light and any infrared light produced too.
The team hasten to emphasize the safety procedures that must be used during such an experiment.
They also take apart the green laser pointer in question to identify the cause of the problem. The design ought to include an infrared filter that blocks any infrared light that isn’t converted to green light. However, the culprit they bought not only did not have the filter, it did not have a slot for such a filter. “We thus believe that the absence of the filter in this case was due to a design decision,” they say
So somebody somewhere has removed the filter from the design, presumably to reduce costs. If that isn’t a criminal act, it ought to be.