SiOnyx Aurora

I was in Maine on business. I went to Kittery Trading Post. Cool place from a Yankee town. I was hanging out in the optics department and the salesman showed me a SiOnyx Aurora. Seemed pretty cool. A digital night camera that can be mounted if front of a rifle scope. It is color

Anybody seen or used one. I currently am hunting with Photons. This seemed interesting.

No, couple guys on here have one and I have see it on facebook.

You won’t want to hunt with it on a weapon , your photon is more capable

It makes a nice scanner in 80% or higher moon phases (clear skies)

Some people are Helmet mounting them for night driving and stalking but it wasn’t designed for that

Yeah, Pig_Popper and I have shared the same unit and have some very similar observations. For night stuff, as he noted, you are very limited to a bright moon, or to using supplemental light sources.

I tried weapon mounting it behind a IR red dot sight and it would work, but there is a noticeable lag. So if you were hunting over a feeder and had a nice, stationary hog, it would be fine. Shooting hogs on the move would introduce error caused by the image lag that I would not want to try to contend with.

With decent moon light, it make for some really darned cool video. You are just limited to the number of days that you will be able to get that video.

With that said, if you are interested in getting dawn/dusk video, say for deer season when normal video cams don't work well, say for getting that 29 minutes before sunup/29 minutes before sundown shot on a big buck, inside 75 yards, this probably will do a neat job for you.

I like this vid. Pig_Popper ran the SiOnyx. The wind was terrible...


Here is where Pig_Popper ran some lighting tests. It is long but has a lot of insightful information...

I totally agree with PigPopper and DNS here. I've got one they sent me for The Late Night Vision Show and I decided to keep it and I've been using it for several months. We will eventually do a review of it. I think DNS summed it up well.

It has the most amazing low light capabilities of any camera I've ever seen or used. If you've got any ambient light, moon light etc it will do shockingly well.....it's almost bizarre how much light it can bring in. But it has no built in IR and mounting one on it is pretty odd and inconvenient at best. For full or bright moon hunting it's a cool little optic to have with you. For low light filming it's really great but as a hunting tool, it's capabilities are somewhat limited. You either need the moonlight or some sort of IR and you can honestly do better with a Photon, Wraith or most other better digital NV monoculars because they all have IR's and they are less expensive.

My take on it is, if you want to use it for actual filming/videoing in low light it's the ticket. If you want it just for hunting use, I wouldn't advise it and I definitely don't believe it's very good for using as clip-on type unit.

Could the Aurora be helmet mounted and run an IR off the helmet as well? Might be a cheap way for night navigation if so.

Yes, and there is a helmet mount for it.

Thanks for the info DNS.

Thanks or the feedback. I am happy with the photon i was just thinking it might be an option for a scoped him