Re: Streamlight: Information?
It's very simple: If you or your buddies are using NV equipment (or the 'bad guys' are), you want to use green lighting because it is next to invisible to the NV detectors and won't cause your buddie's NV gear to "bloom" and won't turn you into a becon for the bad guys to triangulate on.
It has nothing at all to do with 'human dark adapted vision' but with electronic 'night vision' equipment.
As to human vision, the best focus and most sensitivity and accuracy is in the yellow-green area of the spectrum.
Look at any decent chart of how the rods and cones and such respond to various wavelengths of visible light and you will find a 'crossover point' where two of the sensors in the eye are both at about 2/3's of their maximum sensitivity - that point, that exact wavelength, is the one place where the human is most sensitive. Period. Sort of a hideous chartreuse.
At any other wavelength you are down to only one sensor type picking up well, and the overall sensitivity is reduced from that peak point.
Dark adapted vision is a whole different thing, and has been well discussed before on CPF. Red light below a certain frequency (above a certain wavelength) affects one set of sensors only and does not deplete the chemicals in the other two, allowing human vision to dark adapt.
That's the short form.
We see best in white light because all sensor arrays are in use, and that also allows us to discern color accurately.
Anyone here old enough to remember the Pickett slide rules that came in either the standard white or the 'high tech' "ES" green? The ES rules were more accurate (really!) because their background color was that precise crossover point of max vision sensitivity and didn't include the blue and red reflections that the white rules did. This allowed the eye to monofocus on that one narrow band of color without having the out-of-focus red and blue rays fuzzing up the image of those fine hairlike lines. It also allowed the human vision system a more relaxed view because it wasn't constantly "hunting" (dithering) for focus red-green-blue-red-green-blue ...
I had several Pickett ES models, including the classic 1010ES model (I was a Pickett aluminium rather than Post bamboo user).
Anyway, use green lights to be less visible to Night Vision Equipment. Use red lights to protect dark adapted vision. Use charteuse lights for highest vision accuracy.
It's been too many years to try to remember all this stuff.
