Various beamshots - lots of pictures

I was away for a long weekend twenty miles from the nearest light pollution. What better opportunity to play? Unfortunately this is in the middle of some seriously bad forestry done for the grant money about 40 years ago and this timber was never thinned. I had to use a saw several times to clear fallen wood off the track to the house. There have been high winds lately hence the track clearance. So while I waited for it to get dark, I took some pics and charged up all the cells.



The power pole is 30m away. The river Don between the power pole and the second one and it is in spate so I wasn't about to measure exactly. I'd guess it is about 100m to the second pole. The shadowed low wall in the foreground is 12m (Measured) away.

The faded green compost bin with the stone on it is (measured) 25m away.


So here are the entrants.

6D ROP High. KD reflector, KD plain glass lens, 5,000mAh NiCd cells. I mislaid my 6AA ROP Low or it would feature here too. The ROP High was at tightest focus for all shots.
Elektrolumens TriBlaster 4C, 2800mAh NiMH cells (Nasty but all I could get locally)
Romisen RC-T5 Quad Cree running 4 x RCR123.
UltraFire WF-500 running 2 x 18650.
Nuwai ALX153L (Luxeon V) using a pair of 17500s as I've no wish to go bankrupt feeding the thing primary 123s three at a time.
Golston "7W" (burned out original resistor – now using a 3.6ohm one) running 2xRCR123
And finally a Fenix P3D running on a 17670. All the P3D shots were on turbo.
The order is physical size rather than brightness though the largest is the brightest by quite a way.

So once it got dark – all shots are 4 seconds at f2.6 exposure. The sky did NOT seem that light to me. Temperature is around freezing so I tried to be quick, at least for the NiCd powered ROP high and the NiMH powered Elektrolumens TriBlaster 4C (3 K2 LEDs – once the new K2s are again available this guy is due an emitter swap). The Elektrolumens device is a truly great hand warmer. So I pointed the lights at the power pole and the compost bin. The lights were handheld and my aim wasn't all that good at times. The haze in some of the pictures is cigarette smoke and not strange atmospherics by the way.

25 metre shots.
ROP High


Elektrolumens triK2


Romisen RC-T5 quad Cree


WF500


Nuwai ALX153L – which I should have aimed higher up.


Golston


Fenix P3D


Having done that, I tried the power pole which is 30m away.


ROP High


TriBlaster
Oops – forgot to take this one, but then it isn't a thrower anyway.

Romisen

Not nearly as intense a hotspot as the ROP but note you can still see the second power pole 100m away.

WF500


Nuwai ALX153L


Golston


P3D Turbo


Then to show the size of the hotspots I pointed the lights at a gap in the low wall 12m away. The gap is a bit over 1m wide (guesstimated)


ROP

Note the very tight hotspot and that the beam could have as many rings as you like, you'd never know. Actually it isn't too bad at all, my ROP low 6AA is far, far worse.

TriBlaster

Shows more clearly than the others just how busy the moles have been lately.

Romisen
oops - wrong light! Next time maybe.

WF500


Nuwai


Golston


Fenix



Then to finish off I tried to light up the farther power poles on the other side of the Don.


ROP



WF500


Next time I'll take some clamps and another tripod so that the lights are all pointing to exactly the same place. And will try some of the smaller lights at the 12m wall. I got too cold to take the shots this time. Just for fun I'll try next time with a fauxton among others and will get a camera that lets me fix the white balance.

me and my parents were going to go stay the weekend in a cabin in the mountains, and i was going to test all my lights and post beam shots, but they decided they wanted to go to the beach instead, because it will be 70 degrees F in the mountains.

needless to say, i am disapointed...

oh btw nice beamshots

(sorry for the slight thread hi-jack)

Shreknow91 said:

me and my parents were going to go stay the weekend in a cabin in the mountains, and i was going to test all my lights and post beam shots, but they decided they wanted to go to the beach instead, because it will be 70 degrees F in the mountains.

needless to say, i am disapointed...

oh btw nice beamshots

(sorry for the slight thread hi-jack)

Click to expand...

Well, as it happens, this place belongs to my folks. They bought it about 40yr ago and it's the first time I've been up there for quite a while. My handle is the name of this place - dulridge which means something like "black hill" which is a corruption of the Gaelic name.

It is a lot blacker than it used to be owing to the nasty forestry work done in the late 60's/early 70's - I can remember them doing it when I was a kid.

Spent a day or so with a chainsaw tidying the area up. Yesterday morning it was -4C (about 25F). Not a lot of snow about but the sky was wonderful as no light pollution to mess it up. A lot of my friends are into deep space astronomy and regard the moon as light pollution BTW. There was very little moon which made matters even nicer.

Thats cool, i wish i had a place like that, that i could just go up to for the weekend and just relax



ohh also i received the "craptastic" light
and boy were you right that thing makes my mom's stpid keychain light look like a bright monster thrower


Thanks

Shreknow91 said:

Thats cool, i wish i had a place like that, that i could just go up to for the weekend and just relax

Click to expand...

Just what I did - took me 3 days to get around to taking these shots. I took 36 lights with me. After all, the power might have gone out. By UK standards, the power is pretty unreliable, i.e., the power has been out for more than a second in the last year. The last major power outage lasted about a day - in 1998.

Twenty years ago I used to commute to work (55 miles) from there but it didn't have electricity then and my transport was a motorcycle. At this time of year when a good day would hit -3C (26F) and I worked in a hospital which rarely goes below 30C (86F) life got overheated or frozen depending on what I remembered to put in the work bag.

The road is interesting... On a good day when I rarely dropped below 100mph it still took an hour to get to work - my all-time record is 48 minutes and it took about a day till I stopped shaking. Today it took 2 hours as someone had dropped about 30 tons of trees over the road and the detour was up farm tracks for about 10 miles.

Shreknow91 said:

ohh also i received the "craptastic" light
and boy were you right that thing makes my mom's stpid keychain light look like a bright monster thrower

Click to expand...

Well, I did warn you...

The average keyboard LED is brighter. I'll be very interested to see what you can do with it - anything ought to make it brighter...

Enjoy!

Donald

dulridge said:

Just what I did - took me 3 days to get around to taking these shots. I took 36 lights with me. After all, the power might have gone out. By UK standards, the power is pretty unreliable, i.e., the power has been out for more than a second in the last year. The last major power outage lasted about a day - in 1998.


Well, I did warn you...

The average keyboard LED is brighter. I'll be very interested to see what you can do with it - anything ought to make it brighter...

Enjoy!

Donald

Click to expand...

Lucky........ my power was out for like 2 hours on sunday, unfortunatly it was noon at the time :scowl:



I will definetly keep you up to date on what ever i decide to do with it
i probably cant do much because it looks like the reflector is not removable
(i could be wrong)