I built a Laser Telescope Blaster!!

Video Description

A high powered laser + a DIY reverse telescope makes a device that burns things much further away than any of my other laser creations! social media sillyness: shorts channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwGEZhoIwu7GN44Xkr_fXwA instagram: https://www.instagram.com/styro.drake patreon: https://www.patreon.com/styropyro backup channel and b-side videos: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz-3epzOdIyu-aXdeUaVP1A discord: https://discord.gg/hVZMcWT In the video I start by going over the reasons of why my previous laser blasters couldn't burn things from far away. In order to do long distance burning, I needed something with higher beam quality/smaller emitter size. I settled on a 1W 405nm laser diode. It is significantly less powerful than my 200W laser bazooka, but the high quality beam it makes can travel much straighter than those huge diode arrays. A single spatial mode laser diode wasn't enough though. I built a beam expander (just a Galilean telescope in reverse) to widen the beam leaving the aperture so it could stay tighter over a distance. It was cool getting to use old technology on a device like this. For the burning demos I started with some balloons. I found that the laser had to be very stable in order to pop balloons from a distance. I explain in the video that unlike a real ghunn, the laser needs time for the target to accumulate energy so it heats up significantly. With a tripod I was able to pull off some long distance balloon pops, but it became very difficult past 100ft. The most distant shot I made was from about 150ft. For the boomy targets, I used a mix of several chemicals that don't don't like to be together, added charcoal to make it dark for laser absorption, and bound it into a puck with red gum. Big thank you to Esco Optics for supplying the lenses used on the telescopes! escooptics.com