A spectrally tunable light source using a large number of LEDs and an integrating sphere has been designed and is being constructed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The source is designed to have a capability of producing any spectral distribution, mimicking various light sources in the visible region by feedback control of individual LEDs. The output spectral irradiance or radiance of the source will be calibrated by a reference instrument, and the source will be used as a spectroradiometric as well as a photometric and colorimetric standard. A series of simulations have been conducted to predict the performance of the designed tunable source when used for calibration of display colorimeters. The results indicate that the errors can be reduced by an order of magnitude when the tunable source is used to calibrate the colorimeters, compared with measurement errors when the colorimeters are calibrated against Illuminant A. The source can also approximate various CIE daylight illuminants and common lamp spectral distributions for other photometric and colorimetric applications.

This paper presents the research of optimization of road lighting energy consumption by utilizing the fact of human twilight and night vision (mesopic vision) dependency on luminance level and lamp’s light spectral composition. The research was conducted for a suburban street illuminated by smart LED road luminaires with a luminous flux control system with which different luminance levels can be achieved on the road. This road is an access road leading to a town located on the outskirts of Warsaw which is the capital of Poland and a large metropolitan area. Therefore, the traffic here is quite heavy on this road in the morning and in the evening and it is very light at other times of the day. In accordance with EN 13201 standard, lighting control can be applied to illuminate this road. This paper compares energy consumption for different lighting scenarios of the road in question. In the first scenario, the road luminance is compliant with M4, M5, and M6 lighting class requirements depending on the time of the day. In the second scenario, for each M lighting class, the values of luminance levels provided by EN 13201 standard have been reduced to the values resulting from their conversion to the corresponding mesopic luminance values. The conducted research has shown that a 15% saving per year in electricity consumption on the road is possible with such a conversion. Therefore, energy efficiency of a lighting installation can be improved by matching the lighting levels provided by the standard to the mesopic vision.

A spectrally tunable light source using an integrating sphere with a large number of LEDs has been designed and constructed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The source is designed to have a capability of producing any visible spectral distribution, mimicking various light sources in the visible region by feedback control of the radiant power emitted by individual LEDs. The spectral irradiance or radiance of the source is measured by a standard reference instrument; the source will be used as a transfer standard for colorimetric, photometric and radiometric applications. A series of simulations have been conducted to predict the performance of the designed tunable source and source distributions have been realized for a number of target distributions.

This article presents the research on a road lighting design. In this kind of design for a specific type of a roadway, the number and spacing of luminaires are calculated on the basis of luminaire photometric parameters such as intensity curve (LPIC) and luminous flux. The values of these parameters are measured using the luxmeter, i.e., a measuring instrument in which the spectral sensitivity should imitate spectral sensitivity of the human eye V(λ). However, the luxmeter’s spectral sensitivity S(λ) is not perfectly matched with the required one and varies for different instruments, resulting in measurement errors. To avoid this measurement error, the spectral mismatch correction factor (SMCF) should be applied to luxmeter’s readings. For a given luxmeter, the SMCF values depend on the measured light’s spectral composition SPD (described also by the lamp’s correlated color temperature CCT). Unfortunately, many laboratories do not apply SMCF to their luxmeter readings. Typical measurement laboratories are not in possession of SMCF data as this kind of data is hard to obtain and can be provided only by the state-of-the-art photometric laboratories for a high cost. Consequently, these typical measurement laboratories provide inaccurate LPIC data to costumers. In this article, it has been shown that a design process of road lighting installations needs to be based on lighting fixture LPIC’s measurements with SMCF values being taken into account. Omitting this fact may result in road lighting installation made on the basis of a design utilizing incorrect LPIC data, which would have higher energy consumption then expected at a design stage.

Due to the typical ambient light levels in inhabited places and light pollution of the night sky, most naked-eye astronomical observations are performed nowadays under mesopic conditions. The luminance (cd/m²) associated with the brightness of the night sky specified in the astronomical logarithmic scale of magnitudes per square arcsecond (mag/arcsec²) is strongly dependent on the spectrum of the sky, because the spectral sensitivity of the human visual system is not coincident with the standard photometric bands used in astronomy. The conversion between these two families of photometric systems was previously analyzed for observers presumed to be either fully photopically or scotopically adapted. In this work, we deduce the transformation equations between the astronomical and visual photometric systems for specifying and reporting the sky brightness in the mesopic range, within the framework of the MES-2 system for visual performance-based mesopic photometry. It is shown that the dependence of the conversion factors on the correlated color temperature of the night sky reaches a minimum spread for adaptation luminances of 0.5–1.0 cd/m². The sky luminances corresponding to 22.0 mag/arcsec² in the Johnson-Cousins V band (the assumed brightness of a natural night sky devoid of light pollution) span, for 1.0 cd/m² adaptation, a relatively small range of ~195–215 μcd/m² in the absolute (AB) magnitude system and ~210–225 μcd/m² in the Vega-referenced one.