Expert Contributor:
Christian Rysgaard
Estimated read time: 9 min.
Christian Rysgaard from Denmark brings a lifetime of hunting experience, holding certifications as both a rifle and shotgun instructor, along with a long-standing passion for archery, ballistics, and night optics. Working as a hunting journalist with a strong engineering background, Christian is known for translating complex optics and imaging systems into clear, experience-driven insights.
In this article, he draws on that long personal journey – from analog infrared scopes to today’s cutting-edge thermal and multispectral systems – to explain how night–hunting technology has evolved, where each solution still excels, and why no single system is perfect for every hunter or every situation.
Analog Infrared, the beginning
I started night hunting on the old analog IR scopes. My first analog scope was a tough, custom-built unit from a former military factory in Odessa, Ukraine. Sturdy housing. Tactile switches. A brutal 10× base magnification that showed every detail of a wild boar as you sat freezing at a Swedish bait site in pitch-black winter, only 50 meters from the target.
We tested every IR torch we could find, trying different mounts and angles to squeeze the last bit of clarity out of those green screens.
These scopes were pure hardware. No menus, no software, nothing digital, just a fluorescent tube and a power circuit. A single CR123 could run all night. No boot time. No lag. Just that harsh green glow and the discipline to interpret it.
Inside their narrow performance window, analog IR was surprisingly effective.
Digital Infrared, the painful transition
When digital IR arrived, the first generation felt like a downgrade. Battery life collapsed. Image quality struggled. Low-light sensitivity couldn’t touch the old tubes.
For the first couple of years, scopes based on analog technology still won in real hunting conditions. Early digital scopes brought only one real advantage: the ability to record your shots. Everything else was worse, honestly. For me, the turning point came with the first genuinely good digital IR scope, the long discontinued Digisight LRF N455. This was an early Pulsar with an integrated rangefinder. That unit finally showed what digital could become: stable low-light performance, better contrast, and real usability.
Despite access to all the new innovations on the market, I still run the Pulsar Digex C50 in my personal night-hunting setup. I sometimes miss having a built-in LRF, but because all my night hunting is stalking or still-hunting with a powerful thermal spotter with an LRF, I don’t need distance measurement on the rifle. I only shoulder the rifle when the animal is already detected, identified, and ranged. In that workflow, the C50 remains fast, reliable, and brutally effective.
A word on IR torch technology, LED vs Laser
The secret of any IR scope, whether analogue or digital, is the illuminator. The quality of your picture in a pitch-black Swedish night is often determined by the torch, rather than by the scope itself. A laser-based IR torch will always outperform an LED for infrared imaging.
LED emitters produce incoherent light that scatters instantly, creating a broad, unfocused flood that lights up grass, reeds, moisture and even dust near the rifle. This spill light causes the white haze and bloom that can ruin a shot the moment a reed head or low branch gets in the way.
A laser-based IR torch, by contrast, produces coherent infrared light that travels in a controlled and concentrated column. Because the waves are aligned in phase, the beam can be focused with real precision, often down to a coin-sized spot at 100 meters. Almost no light spills into the foreground, which dramatically reduces back-reflection, the silent killer of IR imaging. A single glowing reed can destroy an LED-lit picture, but a properly focused laser IR cuts cleanly through vegetation and humidity.
If you are limited to an LED-based IR torch, you can still improve performance by mounting it as far forward as possible, ideally past the suppressor. This reduces the amount of stray light that can bounce back into the objective lens and helps preserve a cleaner image inside your infrared scope.
Thermal — a different world
Thermal didn’t feel like progress. It felt like cheating. The first time you sweep a field and watch animals light up through darkness, fog, or brush, you realise how blind you were before. Thermal ignores light completely. It treats darkness like daylight. Nothing hides.
I’ve tested a lot of thermal scopes, and there’s a simple joy in not having to think about IR illumination at all. No torch. No glare. No back-reflection. Just a clean picture every single time.
My default setup with a thermal spotter and digital IR riflescope works fine, but between spotting the animal and finding it again in the IR scope, I lose too much time. Modern thermal riflescopes now deliver so much detail that, after years of night hunting, I can identify most animals directly from their thermal signature. I rarely need to study fur patterns or colour tones. Species, gait, and behaviour tell me everything I need.
Thermal didn’t feel like progress. It felt like cheating. The first time you sweep a field and watch animals light up through darkness, fog, or brush, you realise how blind you were before. Thermal ignores light completely. It treats darkness like daylight. Nothing hides.
Christian Rysgaard
Recently, I had the chance to test the flagship Pulsar Thermion 2 LRF XL60 on a practical night hunt in Sweden, and it was a shock to the system. The size of the eyebox, the sharpness, the stability of the picture, and the sheer detail in the thermal image were a clear reminder of how far the technology has moved. Everything felt bigger, cleaner, more effortless.
This summer I got to stalk a fresh Swedish green oat field for wild boars and loved every minute of it. Not wasting valuable time switching between a thermal spotter and a thermal scope. Switching between detection and target acquisition was effortless, and every shot came quickly and landed exactly where it should.
In Denmark we can only hunt with infrared scopes, so my thermal testing must take place in Sweden, and sadly not as often as I would like. But the XL60 proved that thermal tech has taken another significant leap forward.
Thermal is the undisputed king of detection, while IR is beginning to lose the edge in fine identification.
Thermal clip-on, bridging the gap of night and day
My favourite pastime during hunting is stalking deer and wild boar in Sweden. Majority of the action always seems to happen during that magical hour around sundown, when the light collapses faster than your eyes can adapt. This is exactly where a conventional daytime scope begins to lose the battle, and where thermal technology suddenly becomes worth its weight in gold.
The best setup I’ve found, both in terms of cost and real performance, is to bring a single rifle with a proper daytime scope and then attach a thermal clip-on as darkness settles in. It sounds almost crude on paper: using an expensive optical scope as nothing more than a magnifying glass pointed at a tiny OLED screen. But in practice it solves almost every problem that hunting at dusk usually presents.
There is no switching rifles halfway across a field. No walking back to the car. No cognitive reset as you swap a familiar stock, trigger or balance for something else. My motor skills are simply better with the rifle I know and keeping that consistency when the shot finally presents itself is worth far more than any theoretical downside of the clip-on design.
The clip-on essentially extends the working life of your daytime scope into the night. You stalk naturally in full daylight, taking advantage of wide field of view, sharp glass and real colours. As the shadows deepen and the world turns grey, you simply attach the clip-on and continue hunting with the exact same rifle, cheek weld, trigger feel and zero. For the first hour after sunset, the combination feels almost unfair. You retain the positive target identification from daylight while gaining the thermal’s ability to pierce into brush and fading light.
I have tested all the Pulsar thermal clip-on devices, and the one I reach for in this exact scenario is the Krypton 2 FXG50. The F50 / 1.0 objective lens gives a beautifully detailed, narrow field of view that suits late-evening stalking perfectly. The sensor resolution is more than adequate for ethical shot placement, and the overall performance of the device is frankly impressive for its size. It turns a high-quality daytime scope into a highly capable night system without sacrificing balance, familiarity or rifle handling.
A dedicated thermal riflescope will always outperform a clip-on in absolute image quality, especially at high magnification. But for that crossover period between day and full darkness, a thermal clip-on remains the most elegant and efficient solution I’ve found. It keeps the rifle familiar, maintains your rhythm, and lets you hunt seamlessly through the failing light without breaking the flow of the stalk.
Multispectral, detection and identification in one
Multispectral scopes combine thermal and digital IR in one system. Thermal finds the animal instantly. Digital IR confirms exactly what it is. Overlay modes fuse both images when needed. The idea is simple: take the unmatched detection of thermal and combine it with the finer target recognition of infrared, without forcing the hunter to switch optics or rifles.
I had the opportunity to test an early version of the Pulsar Thermion Duo DXP55, and it was immediately clear where the technology is heading. It confirmed everything I already suspected: this is another bold step into the future. But it also exposed exactly why we’re not fully there yet. Zeroing two separate imaging channels is a serious challenge, and it will be overwhelming for many traditional hunters who already struggle with digital scopes. Even after zeroing, you must be careful with shots beyond that distance, because the thermal and IR channels do not follow the same optical path and will diverge as range increases.
The DXP platform adds the full complexity of IR torch management to the equation, and at times it feels more like attending an engineering exam than preparing for a hunt. But once you get past that stage, the experience is genuinely impressive. Swapping between thermal and IR is effortless, and what truly won me over was the ability to keep a thermal overview in the main display while using the infrared channel in a zoomed view for the fine detail that matters before a shot. Being able to see the broad thermal landscape and then instantly zoom in on wild boar details—head shape, ear position, posture—made the identification process far more efficient.
This is a fascinating technological leap, and it will eventually replace the old division between detection and identification. But just like the early jump from analog IR to digital IR, I’m happy to wait until the real-world challenges are resolved. For now, my existing setup still gives me the reliability, speed, and simplicity I want when the shot finally presents itself.