Absolutely not. Lasers are very hazardous especially at those power levels and IR lasers are ESPECIALLY hazardous since your eye reflex won't close your eyelids if you catch the beam or a reflection.
An IR laser is just as dangerous as a visible laser, and in fact more dangerous due to the reasons stated above.
Doing something like this is both extremely dangerous and also irresponsible.
Again, something you do NOT want to do. With powerful lasers, comes great responsibility. This is NOT responsible behavior - shining lasers on houses, barns. Granted, the power levels are quite attenuated as those distances, but still not something you want to be doing.
You're going to attempt educate me on lasers? Apparently you don't understand light energy, claiming that shining a 300mW IR laser at a house a mile away is irresponsible.
Beam divergence on this IR laser covers about 30+ feet at a mile. Let's do some simple math, shall we?
3.14*15*15 = 706.5 Square Feet covered at 1 mile
300mW/706.5 = 0.42mW/SqFt
Pupil Diameter ~5mm(0.2")
3.14*0.1*0.1 = 0.0314SqIn/144 = 0.00021SqFt
0.42mW*0.00021 = 0.00008mW
So you have a potential of approximately 0.08 of a microwatt of light entering your eye at one mile.
At 1/8 mile (660 feet), you have a beam diameter of approximately 3.75 feet.
3.14*1.875*1.875 = 11 SqFt
706.5/11 = 64
0.08uW*64 = 5.1uW
As you can see, even at 660 feet, you have a mere 5 MICROWATTS of approximate light energy entering the pupil, when shined directly at your eyes. I think you can see where this is going. You can finish the math down to even a few feet if you want, but the point is, you would have to get really close to be getting any amount of thermal energy into the eye. The thermal energy is what destroys the retinas.
I have read countless studies of tests performed by shining lasers of more than 5 milliwatts directly into a test specie's eye, and it took seconds, not fractions of a second, for retinal tissue damage to be measured in rats, rabbits, and the like. So, even if you have the energy to do it, the possibility of the light entering the eye long enough to actually do the damage is next to impossible while it's being waved around by a shaky hand. I would literally have to hold it directly aimed into someone's eye from a few feet, for a few seconds, for it to have a chance at distorting retinal tissue.
And think about it on the back of a rocket! A rocket traveling hundreds of feet per second. Do you really think there is even the remote possibility for the rocket to remain in the EXACT flight trajectory required to pinpoint a laser beam onto the same person's eye for even more than a fraction of a second? The rate it accelerates grows the beam size on the ground out of danger zone in probably 1/5 second. That's before it could even aim out over the crowd watching. I don't think anyone's going to be sitting under the launch pad. When it came down under parachute, it still couldn't do it unless there was zero wind, and the rocket had a zero angle change at all times while dangling on its way down under the chute. That's impossible.
Pilots get flashed by green lasers, which are the most detectable wavelength in the spectrum of the human eye. They are blinded by apparent brightness; they do not suffer from retinal damage when it happens. When there is zero apparent brightness as in an IR laser, the possibility of physical effects out past the thermal damage range are non-existant.
So, I cease to acknowledge any form of danger or irresponsibility by shining an invisible light at this power level at the distances I describe. No one out there is in any form of danger. I have studied this topic myself to ensure this.
I just don't like it when people exaggerate the dangers of something which is really not a threat to anyone.
Most of the time I use it as a torch light, with a widely diverged beam aiming across a field. I just focused it down to a smaller divergence for the photos.
