DPSS laser idiot

Here's how his thinking runs...

Just thinking about what experiment I can do next with my green DPSS. Nothing on my mind... just sitting in a chair and lighting up my room with the laser. Because the power is 15 mW, there’s no need to smoke or make fog to see the beam: the dust particles in air are enough. The beam is much more visible when I’m looking toward the laser than it is when the laser is pointed away from me.

I have an idea to reflect the beam from window glass. If each surface has only about 4% reflectance, both window glass surfaces should have about 8% reflectance. I point the laser toward the window and look the reflected beam from window. Reflected beam looks stronger than beam pointed toward the window.

My next, and very stupid wonder is “what will it be like if reflected beam hits my eye?” (8% of 15 mW is about 1.2 mW, so maybe that’s equivalent to laser class IIIa, and if the beam passes across the eye for part of second, nothing will happen...).

But, I was blinded, for tens of minutes, and had lack of sensitivity to green (because my retina is oversaturated with the green color). The laser spot on the wall appeared white. After some time (I’m not really sure how long), my sensitivity to green came back, and my vision was “like new”.

That's bad enough, but then he goes on to do it again. Oh, wait. Make that TWO more times.

The next incredibly stupid thing I did was to try to "scan" the beam very fast, directly across my left eye. My thought is "very fast scan will not damage my eye?" And I was very curious what would happen. My very first observation surprised me - I scanned very fast, but I was expecting white blinding light in the middle of my vision, like what I got from the window glass. But, in the middle it was black!!! I was very surprised, and my curiosity become stronger: "let’s try again, to confirm what I saw" ..."Yes, it is black in the middle!" (My second attempt of "scanning" is not so fast like first time.)

But, then, something was strange when I looked at the laser spot on the wall with my left eye - there wasn’t any spot at all, just green light around center of my vision, and in the middle ...nothing, or maybe only a fuzzy grey "cloud"!

Karakas hasn't written about anything on his web site in the last year and a half so hopefully he's put his lasers away permanently.

At the end of his account he wrote:

But sometimes, in part of second this hobby can make an invalid of me.

No, you made an invalid of yourself. Your hobby didn't do it to you.