Technical Report: Photobiological Hazard Assessment of Orbital Solar Reflectors
Executive Summary This report details a photobiological hazard assessment of the general concept of Orbital Solar Reflectors (OSRs). A recent proposal, Reflect Orbital’s proposed Earendil-1 satellite is used as an exemplar. The analysis was conducted following IEC...
Photometry and Photosynthesis
Ian Ashdown, P. Eng., FIES, Senior Scientist, SunTracker Technologies Ltd. Published: 2014/12/10 UPDATE 15/04/13 -- This article was first published on December 10, 2014. A revised version was published as "LED Lighting for Horticulture" in the Mar/Apr 2015...
Mobile Light Pollution
Ian Ashdown, P. Eng., FIES, Senior Scientist, SunTracker Technologies Ltd. Published: 2016/01/21 At first glance, this appears to be an innocuous question: How much light pollution is attributable to automotive headlights? It is also a good question in that...
Mesopic Photometry and Statistics
Ian Ashdown, P. Eng., FIES, Senior Scientist, SunTracker Technologies Ltd. Published: 2014/04/21 One of the joys of statistics is that you can never be proven wrong ... In a previous All Things Lighting article titled "Understanding Mesopic Photometry"...
Light Pollution and Uplight Ratings
Ian Ashdown, P. Eng., FIES, Senior Scientist, SunTracker Technologies Ltd. Published: 2015/07/20 "Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet." When Rudyard Kipling wrote this line in his poem The Ballad of East and West (Kipling...
Cerise365 and DAYSIM
Ian Ashdowna, Chris Jacksonb, Joel Spahnc, Todd Saemischd a. SunTracker Technologies Ltd., Victoria, Canada. b. Lighting Analysts Ltd., London, UK. c, d. Lighting Analysts Inc., Littleton, CO. Published: 2017/02/11 (Updated 2021/04/12) Ceriss365 and DAYSIM are...
Kruithof Revisited
Ian Ashdown, P. Eng., FIES, Senior Scientist, SunTracker Technologies Ltd. Published: 2015/11/24 A previous blog article -- The Kruithof Curve -- examined the history of the Kruithof curve (Kruithof 1941]) shown in FIG. 1: FIG. 1 – Kruithof curve, modern version...
In the Blood
Ian Ashdown, P. Eng., FIES, Senior Scientist, SunTracker Technologies Ltd. Published: 2014/06/25 We most often think of lighting design in terms of lumens, color temperature, and CRI, but there are occasional situations where a deeper analysis is required....
In Search of Luminance
Ian Ashdown, P. Eng., FIES, Senior Scientist, SunTracker Technologies Ltd. Published: 2014/11/18 The IES Lighting Handbook, Tenth Edition (IES 2010), describes luminance as "perhaps the most important quantity in lighting design and illuminating engineering." This...
Horticultural Lighting Metrics
Ian Ashdown, P. Eng., FIES, Senior Scientist, SunTracker Technologies Ltd. Published: 08/04/2017 UPDATE 17/08/26 - This article was first published on August 25th, 2017 in Urban Ag News. It was all so easy until recently. Plants require light in order to grow,...