Improving Night Navigation With Red L.E.D Light

Warm Red L.E.D Light Globes assist Night Navigation

Night Navigation can be a scary thing for the inexperienced, but seasoned night navigators have learnt to adopt technology that makes the task a lot easier and less scary. The main reason we have difficulty navigating at night is because our eyes are not well equipped for seeing in the dark (and we are not talking here about night blindness because that is a totally different thing).

The human eye is a wonderful device. It automatically adjusts to a wide range of light conditions, just like the lens of a finely designed automatic camera. As the light changes, the human eye opens or closes the pupil to control the amount of light that enters.

During daylight it adjusts fairly quickly to changing light conditions and closes down the pupil as the light increases, then it opens it up as the light diminishes, eventually becoming wide open in extremely low light.

This however presents a number of challenges when navigating a craft at night, particularly if you have a brightly lit cabin. In these circumstances, if you direct your vision outside, even on a moonlit night, it will take what seems like an eternity for your eyes to adjust to the low light and allow you to see with more clarity.

The answer to this dilemma – and the one usually employed by experienced night navigators – is to use a Warm Red Light in the cabin. This is a solution that has been used for many years by the military for night exercises conducted with their tanks, ships and other specialised vehicles.

Warm Red Light assists night vision because its wavelength does not activate the low light receptor cells in our eyes, yet it still provides sufficient illumination for you to navigate around the cabin and perform certain tasks that would not be possible in the absence of any credible light source.

By using Red Light, you then have the advantage of being able to see much clearer outside the cabin, because your eyes are able to adjust a lot quicker to the low light, enabling you to identify those night beacons and other navigation aids that have been installed by marine authorities to assist when navigating our waterways at night.

A red lamp in the cabin proves to be extremely helpful for pre-dawn fishing trips and is also helpful to turn down the backlighting on your GPS or sounder to as low a light level as will allow you to read the data.

Available as either Festoon or Wedge globes, Narva Warm Red L.E.Ds will fit a wide range of existing lamp bases and possibly allow you to get the advantage of better night vison without having to change your existing lamps. Furthermore, Narva also offers red water-proof 12V L.E.D strip lighting, which is ideal for illuminating other areas of the vessel such as the gunnel or deck.

Try using a Warm Red Light during your next night venture and we’re confident you will be pleasantly surprised. For further information, refer to our Narva website, or go directly to our online catalogue, pages 148–149. https://view.publitas.com/narva-catalogue-2016-17/narva-catalogue-2016-17-online/page/148-149