Lasers

hi
At the start of this year I was on holiday (*vacation*) and I was standing
on the balcony of our apartment. I then saw a shiny fully black car
with tinted windows drive past me. I think it did have a normal number plate.
As i watched the car drive past on the street bellow, I see a POWERFUL green
laser beem getting shot out of the car at me. It was really bright.
What do you think this was???

Ta!

It was probably just some kid with a laser pointer.

Green Laser Pointer

definitely a laser pointer. Most likely a diode laser with less than ~5 milliwatts of average power. I suppose if you pointed it into your eye it would be a lot like staring at the sun. Green emitting lasers that are powerful enough to do real damage are most often frequency doubled Nd:YAG's. The power supplies for these kinds of lasers are fairly large, heavy, and require electrical power that isn't supplied by a car.

[edit on 3/20/2005 by ChemicalLaser]

When I was on holiday a couple of years ago, when you went out at night these street sellers were selling some seriously powerful laser pens.
The range on them were proberly over 100ft which wasn't funny when the people in the apartment complex over the road started pointing them towards our balcony.

Erm... 100 ft. range isn't very powerful in my book. I have one that I got for about $15 and the range on it was about 1/5 mile when I tested it.

Originally posted by diehard_democrat
Erm... 100 ft. range isn't very powerful in my book. I have one that I got for about $15 and the range on it was about 1/5 mile when I tested it.

That was just the distance from the 'pointer' to our balcony, so it could have had a longer range.

Just a point of clarification. Power & range aren't the same thing, and often, are not well correlated. The distance that a laser beam can be projected and maintain a nice bright spot at the target is called "beam quality", or BQ. A common measure of BQ is the Strehl ratio, which is a quantitative comparison of the measured spot size in the far field to the diffraction limited spot size calculated from theory and the physical properties of the laser. Some of the world's most powerful lasers have really crappy BQ, and thus don't propogate very far.

Yeah but it was very sunny , not a cloud in sight
the beam was visible, and very bloody bright!

lol

ta!