Hamilton Ontario group using HIDs to illuminate waterfalls

[Black Rose]

My wife found this link this morning and showed it to me.

A group of folks in Hamilton are using HIDs (from Canadian Tire) with different colour films over them to illuminate various waterfalls in the Hamilton area. Includes video clips.

Thought you folks might be interested.

http://www.cityofwaterfalls.ca/

 

[BVH]

Very, Very nice!

 

[Linger]

that was pretty cool BR, thank-you.
My grandmother lives in StoneyCreek about 4min from Bruce trail so as a child we'd always be hiking to go look at one of the falls.
With them lit up like that, its pretty much how I saw them as a childoo:

 

[vee73]

Very beautiful!:rock:

 

[Kindle]

Very cool.

According to the link they're using 20 spotlights with a total output of 500 Million candlepower.

I wanted to see how that compares to the Niagara illumination lights...

Niagara falls use a total of 21 Xenon spotlights...each one putting out *250M candlepower...or a total output of 5.25 BILLION candlepower.

However the Hamilton setup is far greater than the one that illuminated Niagara from 1958-1974...it only had an output of 84 Million cp total.

*There seems to be some discrepancy over that figure. One source listed the lights installed in 1997-98 as having 250 Million cp each. Another source cites the same number for the lights that were installed in '74 and went on to state that the new (97-98) lights were designed to put out 60-70% more light than the ones they replaced.

 

[LEDninja]

Thanks for the link.

So thats where the pictures of the waterfalls on The Weather Natwork website came from.

 

[Apollo Cree]

Unless the lights are all in the same spot, and pointing at the same spot, adding candlepower sounds good, but it's pretty meaningless. You'd need to add up lumens to get anything meaningful.

 

[Patriot]

The "Candle Power" specification is meaningless in this application but we at least know that they used 20 portable spotlights of some type that take a while to warm up. That's good enough for me and I did like the effects they made. They sort of reminded me of Vee73's work with his still photos. Very neat effects.

 

[SemiMan]

If you like them at night, you should see them during the day.... ;-)

For the distance and range, some high powered LED may make more sense and certainly more battery friendly when colour is used. I may have to make some calls.

Semiman

 

[ANDREAS FERRARI]

Here is what the Canadian Tire HID used to light up the falls looks like next to a POB.

As you can see in this picture it has a frosted bulb and a flat bottom reflector-not a good combination if you want max throw.



Sorry about the dirty lens-no wonder it doesn't throw like the POB.:sick2:

If you noticed in the first picture I have my 16 year old 400,000CP Q-Beam plugged into the 12v outlet of the CT HID.The rule one=none applies to spotlights as well.If the HID bulb burns out when I'm in the bush at least I have an incan back up.

 

[LEDninja]

Uh-oh
http://thespec.com/News/BreakingNews/article/704303

That was no UFO over Hamilton
Man was illuminating Chedoke Falls

The strange lights in the night sky last weekend have a rather novel, down-to-earth explanation.

Not UFOs. Not northern lights, either.

It looks like it was Hamilton's own Chris Ecklund and his half-billion candlepower light system illuminating one of the city's 125 waterfalls that caused a ripple of UFO sightings from Stoney Creek to Dundas.

Witnesses reported eyewitness accounts of strange vertical lights in the sky over Dundas and Waterdown to The Vike Report, a British Columbia-based blog devoted to UFO sightings and the paranormal.

Brian Vike, who heads his own HBC Centre for UFO Research, says on his blog that the lights were seen around 8 p.m. Friday.

That's exactly when Ecklund threw the switch to light up Chedoke Falls in the city's west end, part of his campaign to get Hamilton recognized as the City of Waterfalls and a pilot project to highlight the falls' beauty.

"We had all those lights bouncing off the ice and the water up into the sky. It was awesome and 8 p.m. was when we threw the switch.

One witness told Vike that he and five friends were out for a walk around 8 p.m. and saw vertical lights in the sky and watched them for 30 minutes, a throbbing orange one which faded in and out and a second red vertical one. ...
one light had a circle opening in it which looked like an eye. ...
Then the red lights faded away after five more minutes.

"There's no mystery," says Ecklund. "It was just us."