Welcome back to another weekly installment of Friday Night Lights. This week we take a look at something relatively new and yet old at the same time. The EOTech BinoNV-C. It is a lightweight articulated binocular offered by EOTech. There are some interesting things going on regarding this which we will go into in this article.

Did the name of today’s Friday Night Lights catch your attention? Well, let’s go on a little trip through history about a somewhat obscure HUD window night vision goggle called CATS EYES. The font and cat logo are all original from the time period used on promotional brochures about this aviation night vision goggle.

In the few years I have dabbled in night vision, never in my wildest dreams have I thought of what I will be covering on this week’s Friday Night Lights. Night vision rocket launchers! More specifically the rocket launcher night vision mount.

Welcome back to another Friday Night Lights. This week I decided to take a step back in case we have some newer readers who are still deciding what they should buy next, night vision or thermal. That is a loaded question. Almost like deciding if you should buy a rifle or a handgun. It is all personal preference and while both can be used for some activities, they are better suited for specific tasks. They have their pros and cons and we will illuminate them.

Last month I was in Germany for a week. While I was there, I stopped by to check out IEA MIL Optics. I know them as one of the premier night vision dealers in Europe. They are an L3, Unity Tactical, EOTech and Wilcox dealer. They have other products not just those and they are a firearms dealer. Their head of workshop, Leon Kurz, gave me a tour of their gun room. They have some very interesting firearms.

The Organisation for Joint Armament Cooperation ( OCCAR) has signed an amendment to an existing contract for binocular night vision goggles on behalf of Belgium and Germany. The contract is worth a mid-three-digit million amount, in Euros. The follow-up contract will be executed by the newly founded joint venture HENSOLDT Theon Night Vision, which TFB recently wrote about.

If you have been following along with us here at Friday Night Lights, I have posted about a couple of different panoramic night vision options. Quadtubes are the ultimate way to have panoramic NVGs but they are usually cost-prohibitive. It was Noisefighters who came out with a bridge that made panoramic binos a reality. Well, AB Night Vision (ABNV) has finally come out with their ABNV RPNVG. A ruggedized panning night vision goggle. Today we’ll take an in-depth look at this new offering from ABNV.

Well, this is another night vision bucket list item for Friday Night Lights. I assume you recognize the featured image and the name. Yep, that’s right, we get to take a deep dive into an L3Harris FGS (Fusion Bino) aka PSQ-36. Thanks to some very nice people for lending these for us to check out.

GBRS Group has just announced the official release date for their up-and-coming GBRS Hydra Mount for Aimpoint pattern optics. The GBRS Hydra mount is essentially a Picatinny mounted solution that allows you to mount both a night vision compatible optic and an IR device without needing to adjust your support grip to accommodate for the addition of the laser device. This new item will officially drop on the weekend of July 9th, 2022.

Good evening! Perhaps I caught your attention with some nice white phosphor? In today’s installment of Friday Night Lights, I will show you something that is uncommon in the night vision world and in the grand scheme of things is relatively affordable – Sure Shot Night Vision’s PVS-27 retube. They take clip-on night vision devices (CNVD) and retube them with better tubes. It sounds easy but nothing could be further from it.

The Finnish Minister of Defense Antti Kaikkonen has authorized the Logistics Department of the Defense Forces to acquire more combat equipment from Senop Oy. The order is described as significant and includes laser sights and NVG monocular image intensifiers. The value of the acquisition is in the region of 24 million Euros.

As part of TFB’s Photo Of The Day, we have today some 2BCT Thermal Night Optics on show. Here we have a Soldier from the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, engaged in a night live-fire using the L3Harris ENVG-B at Range 22. The ENVG-B provides unique optic capabilities bridging thermal vision with night vision. Location: Fort Drum, NY, United States.

Friday Night Lights is upon us once again. Welcome back. Today we will take a look at the 3D-printed J-arm for night vision monoculars. There are two different makers of 3D-printed J-arms – Noisefighters and FW-Solutions. They have their own approach to mounting night vision in front of your face.

Eye protection from high-powered lasers is a safety aspect a lot of people look over. While most of us aren’t getting blasted daily with unsafe wavelengths and intensities of light, law enforcement, military, industrial workers, and those who like to train with night vision sometimes are. Gatorz Eyewear wants to help fill the gap that exists within the eye protection world with their new Laser Defender Technology which will be made available first with their Magnum and Specter frames.

It’s Friday night and that means we delve into the dark arts of the night. Today’s topic is the LaserMaxDefense (LMD) Pistol Enhancer aka PAiL (Pistol Aiming Laser). This multi-function aiming laser (MFAL) won LaserMaxDefense a contract with the U.S. Army. So let’s take a close look at this somewhat obscure weapon light/laser.

The premier manufacturer of thermal optic technologies, Armasight, has just announced the introduction of their new Armasight Contractor Thermal Optic weapon sight. The Contractor is a 100% designed and built in the USA series of weapon-mounted thermal optics powered by Armasights new ArmaCORE Thermal core technology which grants the user 12-micron pixels, high-performance imaging, and a dynamic feature set in a compact and durable package.

Welcome back to another installment of Friday Night Lights. This week we take a close look at a night vision goggle that is somewhat obscure and somewhat rare. It is the Sopelem TN2 biocular goggle. It was used by France’s GIGN operators. I managed to acquire a used version so we can take a detailed close-up look at this piece of night vision history.

Gen 1? What are you doing Nick? Yeah, I thought this might catch your attention. Today on Friday Night Lights we will look at two examples of Gen 1 night vision scopes, the Fero Z51 and Oldelft HV 5×80.

A few years ago Kinetic Development Group (KDG) came out with their Optics Hub. It is a way to up-armor a Leupold MK4 spotting scope while potentially working with other spotting scopes. Its main feature was that it gave the user the ability to attach accessories to your spotting scope. However, there was one accessory that was not really possible, night vision. Well, now the KDG NOX (Nighttime Optic Extension) has come out for mounting night vision in front of a spotting scope. Let’s take a closer look.

X-Vision Optics have announced the introduction of their TR1 Thermal Reflex Sight. The sight has a range of around 1,000 yards and X-Vision say it “captures sharp thermal images and smoothly tracks rapid motion in the distance.” The TR1 has 1-4x magnification and a 23.6°×20.7° field of view. It can handle “over 53 ft/lb. of recoil allowing compatibility with a large variety of firearms”. MSRP for the TR1 is $1,999.99.

Leica is well known German optics company that is probably more renowned for their cameras than its sports optics. However, the company has been slowly adding to its sport optics category, and today they are happy to announce their first-ever Premium riflescope with the introduction of the Calonox Trinity. This new riflescope is intended to offer shooters a “turnkey” solution for both day and night time precision shooting applications.

Oh hello there. Are you here to check out the InfiRay (iRay) Clip 1 clip-on thermal imager (COTI)? Well, you have come to the right place. Friday Night Lights is a weekly ongoing series dedicated to nocturnal technology. Those consist of night vision, thermal, lights and lasers. So without further ado, let us dive into the iRay Clip 1.

The Department of Defense has announced that Massachusetts-based FLIR Systems and Florida-based Leonardo DRS have been awarded firm fixed price contracts worth over $500 million to provide Family of Weapons Sights-Individual thermal imaging systems. FLIR have been awarded a contract worth $500,219,123 while Leonardo DRS have been awarded a $579,295,440 contract. According to US Army, the production locations and funding allocations for the FWS-I contracts will be determined with each order, with an estimated completion date of 27 April, 2027.

On this Friday Night Lights, we will take a look at an L3Harris Clip-On Night Vision Device – Long Range (CNVD-LR). Clip-on night vision devices are used for seeing farther at night than a typical NVG on your face. They are often mounted inline in front of a day optic like a rifle scope or spotting scope. I will compare this to other well-known clip-on night vision devices and see how the CNVD-LR stacks up against them.

This photo has been circulating online a bit on Reddit and Facebook. It is an odd-shaped night vision mount made by GBRS GROUP. I have not been able to find a name so for now, I shall dub it the Enterprise Mount until an official name is made public.

At the recent IWA exhibition in Germany, Pulsar showed a new setup to attach their thermal front attachments to red dots and riflescopes with the help of an adapter. The product launch is now upon us and is called the PSP-V adapter. It is designed to mount the Proton and Krypton FXG50 thermal imaging attachments in front of optical sights on hunting and sporting weapons with Weaver/Picatinny rails, found on most modern sporting and AR‒15 platform rifles. An adapter may not sound like huge news, but it will actually make it a lot easier to use thermals on a lot of rifles.

It has been discussed and debated for a long time that it is safe to expose night vision to daylight with the unit turned off. For the most part that is true. Some have argued that direct sunlight can affect the image intensifiers even without any power circulating through the tube. Unfortunately, several individuals all experienced a sun blem in their night vision goggles a couple days ago.

This is a review of the brand new Pulsar Digex C50 – Digital Day & Night Vision Riflescope. As you can see in the images, Pulsar made it look like a normal riflescope, so mounting can be done in standard 30 mm rings. TFB got our sample at the end of last year and we’ve been using it during the winter for hunting and evaluation out in the field. The performance is quite impressive, so continue reading for a full review with pictures, videos of wild boar and our concluding thoughts.

The AGM Global Vision Fuzion handheld thermal and optical bi-spectrum monoculars are equipped with a high sensitivity thermal detector and an ultra-low light optical detector. Combined with a display and eyepiece, the Fuzion model line can quickly detect hiding objects even under extreme environments such as smoke, fog, rain, snow, etc. The use can be applied to multiple scenarios like patrol, search and rescue and hunting. The MSRP ranges from $2,200 to $3,039.

It’s now three weeks since Vladimir Putin’s Russia invaded Ukraine. We have seen the Ukrainian Armed Forces put up an impressive fight while Russia’s forces have stalled since their initial attempts at a lightning advance failed. While images of burnt-out or abandoned Russian armoured vehicles have dominated the news and social media there have been some interesting small arms seen. Everything from the newest Ukrainian AR-15s to Russia-backed separatists with Mosin-Nagants.