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Been shooting more and more for distance at night. Either with a 3x on the pvs or a clip on on my 10x NSX.
One thing I’ve been struggling with is guessing range at night.
I’m generally pretty good with guesstimating yardage during the day. From 100-6-700 I can get myself pretty close. Under nods this seems pretty darn impossible.
What do others do under this scenario? Is the best idea to start familiarization with common items to guesstimate range? Fencepost ext?
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Without fancy gadgetry, if you're using the clip-on, just use your stadia/mils to do range estimation based on target size, good skill to learn anyways.
Helmet mounted/or without a scope/optic that has stadia, experience helps. Learn the relative size of things at different ranges and get a "feel" for it, same as you do during the day. May not be laser-guided accurate, but enough time under the goggles, you should be able to get a decent sense of approximate ranges.
FWIW, my property is dotted with range stakes all over the place. To the casual observer, they just look like surveying poles or something, but on my property, I have a target reference point from just about anywhere from any other point, which, since I'm not regularly defending my home against enemy hordes, does also help me get a sense of what different ranges look like with a known distance while I'm just farting around with my NODs, and knowing how big my dogs are when they're running around at night helps too.
Gadgetry is fun and can be enormously helpful, but it's also not a replacement for simple experience and time spent under NODs and getting used to the spatial relationships through the tube.
~Augee