Thread: Help with parallax

First, focus the reticle at infinity. Start with the parallaxdialset to infinity. Next, adjust the eyepiece focus ring till the reticle is sharp (wearing contact lenses or glasses if youre going to hunt with them.) Your eye quickly adjusts focus by reflex to whatever object it sees. So you need to stare into the distance like the sky and bring the gun to your eye and go by what you see in the first second or two. When youve finished, the reticle should be sharp at the same time as a very distant scene at “infinity” (> 1000m approx). If your eye has to hunt back and forth and only one is really sharp at a time then Keeping fine tuning it.

Second, for each shot adjust the parallax ring (side focus) till the target is sharp. If you are short or longsighted there will be a small difference between the focus distance and the parallax free distance. To get the tightest groups its better to have parallax zeroed out and the image may be a bit blurry. Or else hold your eye right in the very middle of the optical axis ! To zero out the parallax, set the rifle in a solid rest and without touching it move your head side to side or up and down . If the crosshair moves on the target the parallax setting needs adjustment. Note that if you do this with your cheek touching the rifle stick you will move the rifle so thats not a good way to do it. For practical hunting its best to simply focus the target sharply using the parallax dial and hope the true parallax zero is close. Some scopes have grub screws you can loosen off to turn the scale to the true distance. Otherwise you need to know how far out your parallax dial markings are and whether they are supposedto be yards or metres or maybe just unmarked ticks.

Third, while hunting, carry it with the parallax dial set to the most likely average distance you will shoot. And wind down the power. If its below 6x you have good depth of field and wont have problems with the target being out if focus. At 3x everything will look sharp (but small). I would be interested to hear whether people think actual parallax error is less at lower power, for the same sighting error (eye away from optical axis). Sometimes it seems as if increasing the power paradoxically reduces the resolution and i can see more detail at 6x than at 8x. This mostly applies when shooting closer than the closest parallax adjustment range eg a Target at 20m when your scope only adjusts down to 50m.