Weird occurance while shooting

M

mainegunner

New member
Well, I was target shooting today with my 20 gauge to collect some shot and a wad for something I'm working on. The gun is a H&R Pardner Pump. While shooting, about 1/2 second after both shots, it was almost as if there was another shot fired from my right, or as if the report echoed but only to 1 side. Nobody was over there, just my barn. I only fired twice. The bore was clear, but I also noticed that the hole in the bottles from where the shot entered was facing toward the right. So I thought that maybe the noise was the pellets exiting the bottle and breaking the sound barrier. But my work shed is over there, and there was no holes or wood splinters anywhere. Just wondering your opinions on what could have happened.:confused:
 
Was it windy? Specifically, was the wind blowing particularly strongly in an unusual direction? Were you standing in a different place than usual?

Sound waves travel with the wind. Picture throwing a rock into a moving river; the waves created by the impact will travel downstream with the current, as will the reflections off the shoreline or other obstacles. Sound behaves the same way, just in 3 dimensions rather than 2.

This can create some unusual effects when you introduce sonic booms made by a supersonic object such as a rifle bullet, shot pellet, or high-performance aircraft. The boom doesn't propagate in all directions like a normal sound wave from a point source or a slow-moving object; it propagates away from the supersonic object at (logically) the speed of sound, but it can't "outrun" the object in the parallel or forward direction, so the shockwave acts like a giant invisible cone moving together with the object. In the case of a bullet or shot pellet moving away from the shooter, the person is "inside the cone", so to speak, so he/she may not hear the sonic "crack" unless and until it echoes off another object... like the side of a barn.

IOW you don't normally hear the echo of the sonic "crack" off the barn, but you were standing in an unusual location, or the echo blew back towards your position due to abnormal wind conditions.
 
echo

The sound of the shot echoed off of the flat side of the barn the time lag was the time for the sound to travel to the barn and back to you
bb
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top