A lot of folks that are familiar with rifle shooting often use the term Minute of Angle (MOA) to describe the accuracy of the rifle. So what is Minute of Angle? Well the definition in its simplest form is 1/60 of ONE degree.
Ready for some brain kicking math?!
If your target is set 100 feet away, then to calculate your MOA, you would first find the circumference using the formula 2Rπ. In this case R the radius is 100 FT.
The reason of 2Rπ is finding the circumference of the whole circle, and now to find the arc length of one degree, you would divide 2Rπ by 360.
Then to find 1/60 of ONE degree, you would divide the above by 60. Therefore now you have the final formula of 2Rπ/(360X60).
The easiest way to use this formula is to plug in the target distance into R and calculate. Remember to keep the same unit.
So if your target is set 100 yard away. 2Rπ/(360X60) in which R equals 100 yard would yield a Minute of Angle of 0.03 yard. Now convert yard to feet by multiplying 0.03 yard with 3 (because there are 3 feet for every yard). Now you have MOA equals to 0.09 feet.
We can further convert feet to inches by multiplying 0.09 feet to 12 inches (because a foot has 12 inches). Now we have a MOA of 1.08 inches.
So that means if your rifle is accurate to shoot MOA at a target 100 yard away, you are shooting 1 inch groups.
The take home message from this is to realize that MOA is dependent on the target distance, and that the closer the target, the smaller the MOA (or the tighter the group). Simply use the formula 2Rπ/(360X60) to find out the MOA at different distance.
Hope you guys like the explanation!
Gun and MATH is SEXY!!!
GUNbie!
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