Red light use cases?

[xenotar80]

@Kalihi

I used to think that super low moonlight/firefly modes made red lights unnecessary, but back-to-back testing completely changed my mind.

I found that even with the extremely low firefly modes on my ArmyTek headlamps (so low that you can comfortably look straight into the emitter with fully dark-adapted eyes), my night vision still returned faster when I used red lights versus the firefly modes. This still occurred even if I used much stronger red light than white light.

I also found that even on the lowest levels, white light wakes me up if I need to get up to do something in the middle of the night, but with red light, I can go right back to sleep afterwards.

And when visiting the local astronomy club’s field viewing nights (where they require red lights), I was again able to do back-to-back testing, and found that red light kept my eyes more sensitive to minor differences in star color than white firefly mode light.

The advantages of red light for me were so big that camping-style multi-emitter headlamps with red LEDs have almost completely replaced my enthusiast headlamps for nighttime use.

That’s really interesting about your experience with dark adaptation with red vs very low white light. I keep seeing people post rebuttals against using red light for dark adaptation. I wonder if it’s across the board or person to person variation.

I personally use either red or 2000K (e21a) at night so it doesn’t jack up my sleep. I usually tend to use the 2000K light since I can see better and it doesn’t have a blue spike like most LEDs. I can blast the 2000K and not have any sleep issues… whereas something like the nichia sw45k (massive blue spike) will screw with my sleep for hours.