Re: Whats the best scope to fight MIRAGE?
I'm not going to join the fray on which scope is "better" to fight mirage. There is no mechanism or technique in any commercial rifle scope or spotting scope which can correct for atmospheric scintillation (aka mirage). It is possible to correct for scintillation but it's not practical for small portable instruments with current technology.
This wiki gives a simplified explanation of how scintillation reduction is currently achieved for some large ground based astronomical telescopes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_optics
The best a shooter can do to control scintillation is to choose times and locations where the atmosphere has minimum thermal turbulence. That's typically at sunrise and when there is heavy overcast cloud cover.
In any conditions there will an optimum objective diameter for maximum resolution, but that diameter decreases with increased scintillation. Thermal induced refraction is the major problem for shooters, but particulate scattering (like smoke or fog) can also be significant. Long pass wavelength filters can give limited improvement.
Detection, identification, and aiming are all important traits of hunting and sniping optics but they have different requirements. Atmospheric conditions can affect each of those quite differently and even independently Poor scope quality can make any of those more difficult, but even inexpensive scopes may not add significant degradation compared to the atmospheric effects.
For detection, the ability to observer target movement along with color and intensity contrast are most important. Atmospheric scintillation can make everything appear to move masking actual target movement even though it's still present.
For identification resolution is most important. The details to tell a male from female deer or to identify friend vs foe may require much better resolution than is required to make a clean kill.
For aiming determining the position and possibly orientation of the target is most important. Refraction in still air with a strong temperature gradient can cause significant apparent vertical offset without much effect on detection or identification.
For justifying spending thousands on a scope correcting for atmospheric effects is low on list of good reasons.
