Night vision flashlight

I have been reading info from a well known Astro photographer who has indicated that red light is not best for night vision. Does anyone have any recommendations for a light with both orange or yellow light or both?
Thanks

I don't know about any orange or yellow lights, but Browning makes a light you can clip to the brim of a hat which has green LED lights, a wavelength of light I've been told wildlife cannot detect. It also happens to be a good color for preserving your night vision. I use these lights all the time when creeping into the field pre-dawn.

http://www.amazon.com/Browning-Night-Seeker-Cap-Light/dp/B00C3XQDS0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1443911717&sr=8-1&keywords=browning+night+seeker

Hope this helps!

Happy Shooting!

The problem with green is it needs to very dim green light. Green light of around 500nm is where human night vision is most sensitive, so if it is too bright there goes you night vision. Red also needs to be relatively dim, you get people walking around star parties with 3W RED LED torches dazzling everyone. Whether wildlife can detect it is another matter and that is why red light is now recommended for spot lighting as most nocturnal animals can't see red light.

I would take astrophotgraphers night vision recommendations with a grain of salt though, they sit around looking at laptop screens which are bright enough to impact night vision even with red filter gels on the screen.

I walk around at night relying on night vision all the time. If you not under trees, then you should be able to walk around an open field without a torch at all.

Too bad they don't sell these with a head band. I hate wearing hats including baseball caps. I use these types of head lamps when attending saw-whet owl banding sessions where you have to basically walk in the dark and the only light is from the head lamp.

OntPhoto, there are a lot of lights that can be used without a cap. This one has red, white and blue lights:

http://www.academy.com/shop/pdp/coleman ... tid=929910

There are a few more here, but mostly white:

http://www.academy.com/shop/browse/camp ... -hat-clips

Joe

OntPhoto wrote:Too bad they don't sell these with a head band. I hate wearing hats including baseball caps. I use these types of head lamps when attending saw-whet owl banding sessions where you have to basically walk in the dark and the only light is from the head lamp.

I'm sure there're flashlights which come with color filters and accessories that let you use them as headlamps. Go to one of those flashlight forums to find out more. Google should help, too. Here's a site that may help:

http://www.fenixtactical.com/fenix-headband.html

Here's another with red, blue and green, but it's bright:

http://www.sportsmanswarehouse.com/spor ... /cat100794

Joe

Here is my article on the subject:
http://www.clarkvision.com/articles/nig ... ng.lights/

I just get a regular white LED flashlight and put paper from a brown paper bag or similar brown plastic over the front until I get the brightness according to my table. You will find this is quite dim. So I also make one a little brighter when I need to walk around or find a lost item.

I agree that brightness is the key issue here and not wavelength for preserving night vision.
Some wildlife observers seem to think that nocturnal birds and animals are insensitive to red light. Far from it.
It has even been found that some animals are sensitive to the 780nm near infra red light that wildlife cameras produce for night time IR photography. See http://www.publish.csiro.au/paper/WR08083.htm which discusses this.
900nm plus seems invisible though.
There is even an internet reference to humans responding visually to IR lasers! However this must be taken with a pinch of salt until someone does some serious work on it under scientific conditions.
Chatting to zoo staff here in Auckland NZ reveals the widespread use of red LED head lights when handling nocturnal animals in darkness situations, not because they cannot see it, but, in their opinion it has more of a calming influence on the animals compared to white light.

Now don't get me started about the UV light I can now see clearly since my cataract op removed my UV filtering lenses!

Joe and DChan, I should have been more clear But thanks for the suggestions. I was actually referring specifically to the Browning model which is a clip on head lamp with green light. After looking at the specs, I can see why it is a clip on as the Browning is much larger than your regular lamp with a head band models. I do own a couple of the head lamps with band type. I purchase them from Canadian Tire.  BTW, I highly recommend one that tilts as the stationary models will get annoying as you walk in the dark and need to light up the ground right in front of you but the beam is lighting up the path much farther ahead.

rnclark wrote:Here is my article on the subject:
http://www.clarkvision.com/articles/nig ... ng.lights/

I just get a regular white LED flashlight and put paper from a brown paper bag or similar brown plastic over the front until I get the brightness according to my table.  You will find this is quite dim.  So I also make one a little brighter when I need to walk around or find a lost item.

What I used to do in the old days when availability was a problem was to get some colored cellophane from a craft store and place as many layers over the light as necessary to get the dimness desired. It can still be done and the colors are diverse. They can even be combined to make new colors. For infrared photography, you can place a piece of non-exposed, but developed, slide film over the light (non-LED) to produce a light that is mostly invisible to the human eye, but will show up on infrared converted cameras. There are even infrared LED's available. You can also use glass coloring stains to color the bulbs. I used to do that as well. These are similar products, although I have not tried these ones:

http://www.misterart.com/glass-tile-art ... color.html

http://www.amazon.com/DecoArt-DASK270-G ... 9PH5HCE2JB

Joe

All of the lights linked above will allow you to find your way around in the dark but they will all impact severely on your night vision as going by their descriptions they are very bright. If it is bright enough to see colour it means your cones in your eyes are working and will impact your rods. This is particularly so for green light as it is right at the peak sensitivity for your eyes' rods. However:

This curve shows the reasoning behind using red light:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_cell# ... sponse.svg

If you use red light at about 650 nm wavelength the sensitivity of the rods is down near zero meaning you are not bleaching the rhodopsin, but your cones have some sensitivity and they allow you to see detail as your fovea is packed with cones sensitive to red light. There are one or two posts around claiming rods are sensitive out into the infra red but no references are given to support this. If this were the case truly preserving dark vision would be near impossible.

I think a lot of confusion comes from various posts talking about the need to read charts or be compatible with night vision goggles and the like. So for instance red writing on charts becomes invisible under red light. If you need to read coloured charts you need very dim white light but the light is so DIM that you wouldn't be able to use it to walk around. So one size does not fit all! I would argue that for general getting around use colour discrimination is not needed, I've been using red LED light for a long time and as long as the brightness is adjustable dark adaption does not suffer too much.

From a visual astronomy perspective red LED lighting seems to be the best solution. LED because the light is single wavelength deep into the red spectrum where it has less impact on your dark adapted rods. Walk around without a torch unless you are under trees which block starlight. Use the red LED torch when you need it and point it down so you and everyone else cannot see the LED. Under these conditions on a good night with the central Milky way overhead you can discern your shadow cast by the Milky Way at a truly dark site - one the the advantages of astronomy in the southern hemisphere, the Milky way runs from horizon to horizon directly overhead in winter. For charts you don't need colour discrimination - just use black and white charts. You soon know if you impact your night vision as faint objects in telescopes immediately become difficult to see.

If you truly need colour discrimination it becomes more difficult. But apart from pilots and military applications requiring the reading of charts, you are unlikely to need colour discrimination and a red LED will be a good solution.

I use the princeton tec remix head lamps. They come white/red and white/green. I use white/red with red at the lowest level. aaa batteries. Can't say they are the best but I like them.

I'm surprised this became such a contested topic. The Browning light, by the way, is not super bright at all. It's about 0.5 watt. I'm glad you mentioned the fact that if you can SEE the color it's too bright. That's interesting. After a few seconds of having the green light on it just appears to be white to me. Also, it's on a hinge so it does swivel to illuminate the ground at your feet or the path just ahead of you. I use these almost daily. They work. I don't run into to trees, I'm fully capable of seeing in the dark just seconds after turning the light off, and I'm able to put my eye to a viewfinder and take a shot. What more are you guys trying to do in the dark that requires such scientifically proven "night-vision"? Red is obviously a better option than green, but are my dim green lights limiting my experience in the field? I don't believe they are. What am I missing? Feel free to continue discussing nanometers and lumens and wattage, but the Browning light serves it's purpose perfectly for me and only costs $10. Maybe reach out to the Astrophotagrapher who sparked the whole debate in the first place and ask about these fabled orange and yellow lights he mentioned. Otherwise, have you tried putting an orange or yellow gel over a normal white headlamp. Seems like that would do the trick, yes?

It's all relative to the task at hand. If you are viewing faint objects through a telescope you'll notice the difference. The reason it's contested is there is quite a bit of mis information out on the web, for example saying green light won't affect your night vision. This seems to come from military applications where instruments are blue green for use with night vision goggles. They are blue-green not for dark adaptation but to avoid over-powering the red sensitive night vision goggles. If you are wearing NV goggles you won't be dark adapted anyway. BTW a 0.5W LED is really quite bright in this context.

As far as limiting your experience in the field the only way to tell is to try it out. If you are using a digital camera, the LCD screen is bright enough to impact your dark vision for instance. And there is a difference if you let your eyes fully dark adapt you can easily navigate under an open sky without torch light at all. It's only when you head under a tree canopy that you start to struggle a little, but you can normally still walk familiar pathways where you don't need to dodge branches etc. Your eyes are amazingly sensitive at night (even though they pale compared to say an owl) and most people these days never experience true full dark adaptation unless they are an amateur visual astronomer or maybe in the military.

at the few star parties I've been to they were all using red.

Instead of a high-tech solution, why not just use a glow stick. The light is subdued and not concentrated in one spot. They still provide enough light to see around you.

Glowstick

and here's a colored battery operated glowstick that I saw this morning. It seems to be fairly dim and is only $3.97:


LED Glowstick

Joe

I like Joe's idea but you need to test to see which glow sticks work best. I've seen a few that were as bright as my iPhone or screen prior to turning them down. And it's not like you can adjust a glow stick after it turns on. Of course, you could turn it on 4-5 hours early and use it after its run down some. I've had some last several days with enough light to see the stick though not enough light to see around the stick. The other problem is there are not directed light which is a minus in my view.

As for my GoTo flashlight for low light work, I have a Surefire Tia Titan which turns on by rotating it and it starts at the lowest setting which is rated at 1 lumen. I have a few others that have a 5 or 10 lumen low setting and I consider those too bright for true night sky work and maintaining night vision. I also bought some red-light flashlights and they turned out to be WAY too bright for night work. If you are going to buy something, it should be adjustable and better if it turns on using the lowest setting and adjusts up from there like the Tia Titan.

ChrisRoss wrote:All of the lights linked above will allow you to find your way around in the dark but they will all impact severely on your night vision as going by their descriptions they are very bright.  If it is bright enough to see colour it means your cones in your eyes  are working and will impact your rods.  This is particularly so for green light as it is right at the peak sensitivity for your eyes' rods. However:

This curve shows the reasoning behind using red light:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_cell# ... sponse.svg

Chris,
It is plots like that that are misinformation.  Those curves are normalized.  See the plot on the page I referenced:
http://www.clarkvision.com/articles/nig ... ng.lights/
where I have plotted the rods and cones showing their relative responsivity.  At all wavelengths rods are more sensitive or as sensitive as cones, even in the red.  I see too many people at night using red flashlights that are way too bright.

Roger