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If you’re a techie, chances are you remember playing around with one of those red-beam laser pointers when they first came out. There are certainly a lot of ways to use it. At school or work you can use them when presenting PowerPoint slides. For fun, you’ve probably confused your pet with them and pointed them at friends’ foreheads.

But, let’s face it, red laser pointers are just so old school now. Everyone has one. Your grandmother has one, and she doesn’t even use PowerPoint. You need a new toy to make you the top geek at work and create new fun with your friends, furry and not.

Red lasers, as any good geek knows, use the boring old 650 nm wavelength. The cool new laser pointer that we’re going to tell you about uses the far more powerful 532 nm wavelength. And, best of all, that means it’s green.

Green laser pointers, being more powerful than red, can highlight things far, far away. Not just lecture slides across the room, or your friends’ kill zone, but clouds, low-flying aircraft, star constellations. You can even see them outside during the day.

This equipment is so strong that it could actually get you arrested! Yes, arrested. Pointing a green laser beam at an aircraft could have the FBI on your case, wondering if you’re planning possible terrorist operations from your backyard. Pretty neat, huh? Your old dinky red pointer can’t do that.

When you point it at something, the pointer doesn’t just produce a tiny dot on its target, either. You can see the entire beam traveling all the way there. People seeing your beam will think it’s a light saber. How cool is that? Think of the new possibilities for light saber swordfights.

To make a green laser pointer, you need a whole level of technology way past the red laser pointer. The true green laser pointer requires a green direct injection laser diode, and these are not available for public consumption. So, there’s a whole complicated thing they have to do. (This next paragraph is only for extreme geeks.)

The green laser pointers you can buy on the market now are all using the very impressively named Diode Pumped Solid State Frequency Doubled technology, which gets shortened to DPSSFD, which is good for everyone. What this means is that an infrared laser diode pumps out 808 nm which is then altered to 1,064 nm which is then shot into a crystal that doubles the frequency to produce the green beam at 532 nm. (With frequency, smaller numbers mean stronger, but you knew that right? Only a geek actually read this paragraph.)

So it is no wonder that green laser pointers are a must-have for the geek elite. While the green laser has been around a while, it’s not so easy to find outside of technical settings (again, remember they can target airplanes). They’re also not cheap. While you can pick up a red pointer for less than $10, a green one will set you back $50 or so, not out of reach, just not something you might purchase casually (or more to the point, something your grandmother won’t purchase on the spur of the moment). Go on, you know you want one. Yeah, you know you really need one. What’s stopping you?