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Technique and costs for night dives with Fluorescence
Several items are needed to watch a new magic underwater world:
1. special lamp
2. filter for the mask
3. filter for the camera
The principle of underwater fluorescence is closely related to fluorescence techniques which I used in my lab in molecular biology and which people use in biological and medical research. Prerequsite is a source (lamp) producing short wave light (blue light). The target, here corals or animals, are reflecting light of lower energy with another (longer) wavelenght (visible blue, yellow, green, red and dark red), depending of the target (different species of corals and certain animals) > see also my movie at YouTube. The clips of this 9 minutes film were prepared from my 6 hour material with a HD-camcorder in Egypt. I used a HiTec-LED-lamp constructed in my machineshop at home. My fluorescence lamp is much more powerful than those momentary commercially available. We are able to scan areas of 5 x 4 Meter (see movie), which is very efficient for reef check studies. However, those on the market are sufficent for fun-dives to illuminate small areas of 50 x 40 cm. Instead of one or two LEDs there are 16 HiTec LEDs in my lamp.
For information about commercially available items you can contact me horst. grunz et uni-due.de
The fluorescent stuff in addition to "normal" diving lamps is not cheap.
On the other hand not all scuba divers are poor persons. It is possible to construct more powerful lamps at home. However, I am sure that only few people are willing or have the technical possibilities (abilities) and the time for such activities. It should be pointed out that "homemade" HiTec-stuff is not chaeper, even more expensive. Very elegant is a combination of normal lamp systems with additional exchangeable fluorescent lamp heads. I use the TillyTec sytem (http://www.tillytec.de/), which allows the connection of different heads (with normal LEDs and/or special blue LEDs) with a flexible cable to a powerful AKKU (details of my equipment
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