Re: Red Lights

At your local bookstore you can find battery powered book reading lights.

Then go down to your local electronics supply house (not Radio Shack, but a real supply house) and get a flashlight-based LED bulb. (It is an LED with a base that fits into a flashlight.)

Put one in the other, and you have what you want.

Another Solution: Go to Radio Shack, and get one of their six power (or so) illuminated magnifying glasses. Change the bulb to a red LED, or just use red tape (available at Pep Boys and such for taping over broken taillights).

By the way--red lights used in astronomy should be dim. A bright red light affects your night vision, even though it is red. For this reason, I generally do not think the table lamp modification is a good idea.

Alex

Hi Alex,

The table lamp red light is much dimmer than the picture suggests, I'm using a Radio Shack 12V red panel indicator. It is actually anything but bright. It is just difficult to get the brightness levels in the picture to look right when they are very dim.

I have used this several times now in new moon mag 5.5+ skies, and found it to be about right. In fact The intensity can be roughly adjusted by varying the distance to the chart.

But of course you have a valid point, some folks go with an almost invisible amount of light. A simple fix would be to add a rheostat in series with the 12V. In fact a bought one of these in anticipation of this, but found the light level close enough to what I like, that I just used it straight.

Having a weighted base lamp that can hold down a chart is very convenient when the breeze starts up

David Simons