Re: True Red-Arc AAA vs CMG Infinity as cockpit li
Aux,
We have a good friend who lives a short distance from me who is a pilot - for a living, not just pleasure. He loves the Infinity Red and still has it despite the fact that it has been mostly usurped by the Red LED A2 we just gave him as a late birthday/early christmas present (he went NUTS).
The red Infinity produced just enough light for reading instruments and maps and he would use it by placing it over the ear of his headset under the headstrap so it would shine wherever he was looking.
Off topic:
Re: that article debunking Red light as the proper light to use for night vision. IMHO, although it has some good information, it may be misinterpting some basic facts about vision. My conclusions, based upon published research papers about vision available at any university library (in all likelihood more relable than "internet sources"). I really wish I had kept my college research papers so I could give exact references, but I remember their content and here is what I came up with:
1) The parts of your eye responsible for night vision essentially blind to red light, so red light preserves night vision because the rods are essentially unaffected.
2) The fovea of the eye, where you see the most detail, has the least rods. Red light stimulates the cones in the fovea allowing you to see good detail while not burning out the rhodopsin in the rods.
3) Green and blue green light bleaches the rhodopsin in the rods, making them less sensitive to dim light (a fact frequently overlooked), while red does not.
4) Intense red light will produce afterimages that can overlap with night vision perceptual fields, so keep the red light as dim as possible.
5) For most users, a very dim white light will work nearly as well as a dim red light, since the levels at which preserving night vision are critical (astronomy - perception of extremely dim stars) are rarely needed by the average user.
So basically there is no need to bother with green or blue-green light at all unless you want to show off your neat new LED light to your friends and get a "wow" out of them... /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/rolleyes.gif ...or you are using night vision equipment, which is a whole different story.