Red light is awesome
A couple of years ago, I was very interested in stargazing. One important and useful lesson that I learned when carrying around large telescopes in very dark places, was that red light is your best friend. When you spend time in darkness, eventually your eyes will adjust their ability to see in darkness. If you are exposed to strong light from e.g., a flashlight, headlight or device screen, you will instantly overload your sensitive eyes and consequentially wait for a while until your eyes adjust themselves back. Needless to say, it is thus crucial to adapt your eyes when stargazing – and to keep them that way until you are done. But how to orient oneself in pitch black darkness? By using red light!
Red light has the longest wavelength/lowest frequency of the visible light spectrum. You’ve probably heard about infra-red and ultra-violet light. The same principle goes for sound, i.e. infra-sound = low frequency and ultra-sound = high frequency, which makes it an easy principle to remember for an acoustician. This means that if you use red light that is on the limit of visible light to orient yourself darkness, your eyes will keep most of their ability to see in darkness. That’s why you should invest in a head lamp or flash light that can be switched to a “red mode”. I have also found my red headlamp to be very useful while camping outdoors, where proper unassisted night vision is valuable.
Some months ago, I invested in a (silly) smart home system with RGB lights. Mostly for fun, and to add some atmosphere in my music rehearsal room, and to make my practice sessions feel a bit more like being on stage. Hint: The placebo works! However, I also found that it was very nice to set the smart lights to red in the evening. It was so nice that I added more of the lights and led strips inside our home and bedrooms. Maybe you’ve seen those baby night lights that you put in the wall outlet? They are quite useful if you have small kids because you’ll be up and running in the middle of the night for a couple of years. But once you try out red light for night orientation, I suspect there is no going back. In our main bedroom I installed a dimmable light strip that we use in the evenings on 1% light strength, all red, and it is fantastic. It does not disturb your ability to sleep and you see perfectly what is going on. Of course, I turn it off when it is time to sleep, but for orientation it is magnificent.
I am now thinking about installing even more smart lights in the hallway and toilet so that I can get red light everywhere with the flick of a switch. One could perhaps enable a geo clock so that the lights go to red mode at 1% strength between 22:00 and 06:00 for example. It is quite nice when you discover that the stuff you bought for fun actually turns out to be extremely useful in practice. So, if you are in the market for buying smart home lights, I highly recommend the RGB lights if you want to get the night mode. I have also tried what happens with other colors once your eyes are night-adjusted. The difference is huge. Every other color than red is uncomfortable for the eyes, but Blue light is perhaps the worst one of all. If I enable blue mode it actually hurts a bit in my eyes. It feels overwhelming for my eyes. It is not a coincidence that the rescue services use blue light with their sirens. It is very hard to miss blue light.
Oh well, time to turn on my red lights and go to bed. I hope you learned something new if you read all the way here. Good night!