A scope question

[joeb33050]

Shooting a pistol. Higher power scopes reduce eye relief, higher power on variable power pistol scopes does the same. When eye relief goes down, my arms become too long and must be bent at angles that screw up my shooting.
Any scope shows the center, not the whole picture, at beyond-eye-relief distance. I can move or keep my head back, raise power, and see a smaller picture/FOV in the scope.
QUESTION: Does the scope still look at center, are the cross hairs still in the right place, can I use smaller picture aqnd shoot accurately?
This is about optics.
Thanks;
joe b.

[felix]

Moving the rearmost eyepiece adjusts your sight picture in terms of focus on the crosshairs only. Adjusting the parallax makes the light from the target going into front of the scope match up squarely with the crosshairs. The matching distance might or might not allow focus at the target, depending on the quality of the scope in handling the entire light path from target to eyeball. Whenever you adjust the crosshairs, you take the crosshairs off the designed center of the light path for perfect adjustment. Parallax must be corrected after adjusting the crosshairs. If the light path is fully adjusted, you can sight through the scope at any angle and hit where the cross hairs say the boolit will go. With scopes having no parallax adjustment, you are SOL in terms of hitting the point of interest, UNLESS you sight exactly where the cross hairs are centered in the scope, which might not be at the center of the scope's light transmission. This is the exact reason for the external cross hair adjustment type of scope. However, they don't work as advertised because of grit getting into the contact areas. ... felix

[dale2242]

I`m 6' 3" tall with a 6' 6" wing span. I find ANY long eye relief scope to lose the full field of view after about 4 or 5 power. I have a 2-7 power LER scope and never shoot it above 5 power. A real PITB. But it`s the nature of the beast. I would not recommend any handgun scope over 4x unless you have very short arms.---dale

[jhalcott]

Another trick to using a scoped handgun is ALWAYS use a rest! I'm tall like Dale and have the same arm problem. I use any thing handy as a rest. I even carry a walking stick with a yoke for those times there are no trees, fences or big rocks to lean on.

[fourarmed]

Joe, if your scope is properly adjusted so there is no parallax between the crosshair and the image of the target, that will not change when you move your eye back away from the optimum eye relief. That is a property only of the positions of the reticle and the objective (front) lens.