SON/T cruelty

Here’s tonight’s experiment trying to replicate Max’s description of overdriving a HPS and broadening the absorption space and changing the lamp colour. Haven’t quite got it turning blue but it does get intensely white. The camera just doesn’t do it Justice. Anyway, it’s running on a 400V supply with it normal ballast otherwise it difficult to control the current. Shown here the top lamp is running normally for comparison. To improves the result, the lower lamp has a tinfoil jacket on, as recommended by James, to reflect the heat into the arc tube. It certainly works but make keeping the lamp on harder. I have to try to keep the current through the lamp close to 1.5 A. If it falls below 1.0A the arc extinguishes. I can push it to 500v on my current setup but only for a short period. I have cycled this lamp so many times and so hard am not sure it is preforming quite the same as it did originally but it look ok. Interestingly, the sodium line broadening seems to only go so far then the colour change seems to be more related to the blue spectral lines broadening and brightening.