Target focus, front sight focus, and....something in between?

[Raytheon]

On 1/7/2019 at 8:55 PM, mvmojo said:

I'm right handed and VERY strong left eye dominant - to the point where my right eye is generally, in day to day use, only used for peripheral vision.  I wear progressive lens glasses all the time, from the minute I get up in the morning until the minute I go to bed at night.  They suck for shooting, I have to tilt my head back to see the front sight clearly!  So I took my gun to my eye doc and had him measure the exact distance from my eye to the front sight.  I had a pair of glasses made where the left lens is set to make the front sight crystal clear - the target at anything beyond 5+ yds is a blur.  The right lens is set for distance.  This made a major difference in my shooting.  Before I draw, I make sure I'm only using my left eye and that the target is blurry.  This is a conscious decision since my brain wants to see the target clearly and therefore wants to switch to my right eye.  But by making myself look at the target with my left eye, even though it's blurry, when I draw the pistol, the front sight is clear and my first shot is faster and more accurate.  As I transition from target to target, I have to force my self to keep my left eye focused on the front sight rather than "switching" to my right eye to see the target.  But, if I can do that, my scores go up!  Dry firing with long transitions helps a lot!!!

This is all very interesting to me! I have the same messed up, astigmatism, cross-dominant thing going on.  I shoot pistol right-handed, my strong eye is my left.

A while back, I found a new way to aim for me, and it works well.  Instead of focusing on the rear sight, which is not easy because of the above reasons, I focus on everything equally poorly! Haha.

 

Seriously, though, I focus mostly on the target, with both eyes open, head and body square to the target, with no weird tilting of my head. My sight picture then looks sort of like the attached photo. I just had to train myself to know that when it all looks like that, I will hit well. Like I had to memorize that look physically/ optically. I'd say the target is in focus fairly crisply, the front sight about halfway in focus, and the rear sights a little less in focus than that. My right eye (non-dominant in my case) produces a ghosted out image of the whole sight picture that floats up and to the left. 

At first, my eyes would fight this and try to pull the front sight back into focus, but now I don't fight it at all, and I can "see" this modified sight picture quickly and easily. My accuracy improved, and shooting is just easier for me this way.

Eddie