Re: Binoculars (?)

CSTOM@stmarytx.edu
Wed, 19 Apr 1995 22:50:12 -0600 (CST)

Chuck, I think that your 5 to 7 degree misalignment figure is a little too optimistic. In my first binocular viewing experiment, I had my subjects view deep space objects [1] monocularly with the preferred eye, and [2] binocularly. All viewing was with two different "beam splitter" devices, one of them a Tuthill unit and the other an Olympus unit. The various viewing sequences were counter balanced in order to avoid a sequential preference bias. Two chunks of info resulted; [1] Almost every one of the subjects found the binocular view to be more satisfying in that more detail could be seen than with the monocular viewing and [2] most of the subjects preferred the Olympus unit, even though its smaller prisms passed noticably less light than did the Tuthill. The reason given for prefering the Olympus was that it was easier to merge the two images than in the Tuthill. Please note that in every viewing condition, whatever light reached the eye had to pass through the beam splitter with its characteristic light loss.

Tom Mote Physics Dept. St. Mary's Univ.