General > General Technical Chat

Sign of the times

(1/15) > >>

PlainName:
As my attention started to drift on the final leg of a 195 mile round trip the other night, I realised that the orange glow on the horizon, from whatever city/town is out there, has gone - now it's a white glow. But being white and like moonlight, it's much less obvious. In fact, I think I only really noticed because of the lack of orange glow and knowing what that would have looked like.

It won't be long before only olde fuddy-duddies will remember seeing that glow.

Zero999:
Very true. The whiter light from LEDs is also bad for wildlife and astronomy.

eti:
The "ECO" nuts have screwed society with their agendas. I don't mean that renewable energy is not great, I mean that the OBSESSION with LED everything is a political  ego massage.

PlainName:
Gotta say that brighter, whiter, longer-lasting lights with rechargable batteries that pack a huge punch and don't self-discharge certainly has me railing against the eco-freaks.

Er... or perhaps not :)

james_s:
I still remember when it went from white mercury vapor lights to orange high pressure sodium in the early-mid 80s. I never did like high pressure sodium, in my opinion they should have just stayed with mercury. HPS is more efficient on paper but I never thought the ugly orange light worked very well to actually light things up, it just sprayed glare everywhere and the scene looked dull and dark. The green spectral line in a mercury discharge makes vegetation glow.

Low pressure sodium is monochromatic and is useful for astronomy but HPS is sufficiently broadband that filtering it isn't really much easier than white light, it just makes everything look icky and orange.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page