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M-53a Russian Visibility Meter

Picture

Front View

Picture

Rear View

This is a Russian M-53a Visibility Meter.  The manufacturer and date of manufacture are unknown to me.  It was commonly used in the Soviet Union to determine airport runway visibility range during the daytime.  The user looks through the central eyepiece.  It uses a Polaroid filter and overlapping split image to allow the user to estimate the visibility while turning the knob on the rear of the instrument. A numbered scale is then observed in the upper eyepiece.  It suffered from the same shortcoming as the Gold visibility meter: the subjective nature of the human eye.

The disk is 4 inches in diameter, and it is 9 inches long with the handle.  It weighs 1.3 pounds.

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