as a kid i used to shoot springfields and garands a lot. i got used to those tiny rear appertures. i suppose one’s vision cone really has to focus down in order to acquire both the front sight and the target. now, with bigger appertures like in the AR-15, they say accuracy is supposed to stay the same since one’s vision cone will still center the apperture opening and put the front bead dead center. is this true? to what level of precision?
you’re wondering why i don’t experiment to find out for myself? i was never that good a shot so i couldn’t make an objective comparison. it took me years to be able to hit a dinner plate with a 30-06 from an offhand position at 100 meters. i was able to compare two apperture sizes, both mounted on pre-64 winchester m70s. i got used to the bigger peep hole soon enough but i feel a smaller one is still more accurate.
I think I understand your question but I will elaborate for people that aren’t familiar with peep sights. Peep sights are purely physical sights that you use to aim a shot from a rifle. The lower end that you look through is a circle that you look through and the other end of the sight at the end of the barrel is a simple bead on a post that you place on target. The goal is to look through the circle and place the bead so it is centered within the circle and fire when it is on the target.
The circle part of the peep sight that you look through is fairly big to give you a decent field of view when looking through it. The idea is that your brain can automatically find the true center of the circle to place the dot and you can hit the target with considerable accuracy if you trust your instincts and just aim the dot at the target.
The questions seems to be if it makes any difference if the circle you look through is large or very small. It seems intuitive that you could find the center of a small circle better than you could a large one but I don’t really know if that is true. I don’t really know the full answer to the question unfortunately. You won’t get good enough accuracy from shooting offhand at 100 yards to tell. Too many other factors would come into play like basic shotting competency, trigger squeezing style, and muscle steadiness. An expert shooter could determine a difference from a bench rest but I don’t know of any of those experiments first hand although I am certain they have been done somewhere.
I can say that if you can’t hit a dinner plate at 100 yards, then the sight isn’t the fundamental issue. All reasonable peep sights allow well below that level of accuracy. Most people have trouble shotting a 30.06 offhand without lots of practice just because the anticipated recoil and noise causes unconsciousness flinching at the last few critical millseconds. You would have to test yourself with something much lighter off of a bench rest to truly test yourself on this.
I agree with everything Shag posted.
Hitting a dinner plate off-hand at 100 yards is not bad for what you are shooting. I see hundreds of shooters at the deer hunting sight in days that I know could not do that except by accident!
The point of focus for the eye is always on the front sight and a dinner plate at 100 yards is not going to be in focus and without a bold bull’s eye on the plate it is hard to group shots.
I have an old .22 rimfire w/ peep sights and the rear aperture is interchangeable with some very small peep holes. Basically what they do is block out distractions. When hunting we would remove the peep and shoot using the sewer pipe.
I teach pistol shooting and see much better shot grouping when i put up a 4" target than i see with an 8" or larger.
Trigger squeeze is just as difficult to preform as is sight alignment, then add in proper follow through.
So I say “Good Shooting”!
You can get by with no rear sight if your eye is in the right place…see shotguns. The function of the rear sight is to indicate when your eye is in exactly the right place. With a peep sight there is a fairly narrow cone in which to place your eye where you can see the front sight at all. So called “ghost ring” sights allow you to look around the outside of the aperture to see what surrounds the target.
Larger rear apertures allow more slop in initial eye alignment, which makes for faster target acquisition, and they pass more light, so are better in low light…but they don’t locate the eye as accurately. Too small an aperture can have diffraction effects and blur the target.