I have one of the momentary-on green laser pointers from z-bolt.com. It
is very bright, and I use it for astronomy. Unless you are in an arid
climate, the laser beam is visible because of scattering from water and
dust in the atmosphere. You can point to objects and the students can
essentially follow the beam up to the object you're point at.
I also made a mount for it to fit on my binoculars. With a bit if
adjustment, I can see the beam pointing to the same thing I am looking
at with the binoculars. Students each have a pair of binoculars, and I
just find the object in my binoculars and hold it there, and they take
their binoculars and trace the beam right up to what I am looking at,
When everyone has it, I release the button and we can all look at the
object without the green light. It's quite wonderful.
One word of caution. Because these were designed to be used in
astronomy as I described, the laser diodes are driven quite hard. They
have a limited lifetime of about 2000 hours. If you get the
continuous-on model, you'll run down batteries pretty fast, and you'll
also use up lifetime. 2000 hours is 83 days. If you would power this
with a power pack and leave it on all the time, 83 days is not very
long.
Michael D. Edmiston, Ph.D.
Professor of Physics and Chemistry
Bluffton University
Bluffton, OH 45817
(419)-358-3270
edmiston@bluffton.edu