Stadium Expansion

About time there was some progress, it was supposed to be complete in October

 

I could see that from my house last night. Appalling light pollution.

 

It takes a couple of days to fire up the undersoil heating so unless youve turned in on in advance you have got no chance. Plus if enough snow falls it will settle anyway and it takes ages to melt snow.
I see they are using the light rigs to melt it.. which will work but again will take a long time.

 

This is another major bugbear of mine and I really should post in another thread. Whenever I've mentioned it in public people look at me as though I'm some sort of loony (more so than usual). It's getting so bad the nearest dark sky is Wales or Cornwall...

 

Do it.

 

You can get reasonable clear skies if you drive 30 or 40 minutes down the M40 into Oxfordshire.

 

No you really can't (unless your definition of reasonable is contentious). Only times I've seen the night sky in all its glory have been the times I've sailed the Channel....there is nowhere on land that comes close and I genuinely feel for the people that have never seen shooting stars within the true beauty of the sky at night.

 

The last couple of Summers we've been lucky enough to be on the Isle of Wight, (stuck in the dark ages anyway), in a place with very little light pollution compared to the normal UK levels. We saw the Perseid meteor shower both years running by laying on blankets in a field late at night. Even more amazing was we had clear skies both times.

 

Who cares about light pollution ? The lights are on for a reason. Who cares if the sky is very dark or just darkish ??

 

When I said I feel sorry for those who have never seen the night sky, I probably didn't mean to include dullards.

 

You are preaching to the converted buddy, there is no sight on earth to compare. It's like the best firework display but static, and permanent.

 

Dullards? Those who don’t get upset because they can’t see the stars clearly enough because the sky isn’t quite dark enough ? Righty ho.

 

Someone give Gino a ring.. he'll fix it. Probably make the night sky some nice Watford colours and add in a few more stars while he's at it.


"Look at the Stars..."

 

How to tell if you're suffering from Light Pollution:
1) On a clear night look up at the night sky.
2) If you can't see that the stars/planets/galaxies/nebulae are different colours then...

[ANECDOTE] I got my kids into star-gazing as I was given a bottom-end of the range GOTO scope (this one*). We started going here as often as we could during the winter (clearer skies) as it was quite lose, cheap to stay at and, up until 5 years ago, it was a bit of a "black spot" (up until the highways agency / council replaced all of the sodium vapour street lamps with LEDs) but the downside was the site was in a small valley surrounded by hills that meant objects** low on the horizon were impossible to see). We started using filters on the 'scope but this meant very feint objects were also being blocked out. This meant over the period of 10 years we went from seeing the sky with binoculars, the using to GOTO feature to track objects to watch "live" and photograph, to using the GOTO feature to track objects we really couldn't see and recording them for around an hour and then spending at least another hour back home number crunching the data/film to produce a poor image - as beautiful as the moon is after a couple of years of looking at it the kids began to lose interest. [/ANECDOTE]

*Possibly the best shop on the planet.
**The dark skies went 5 years ago for this place.
***Normally planets especially Venus and Mercury.

 

You’re talking out of Uranus

 

Does anyone know if the new Palace re-build will encompass Oliver Grove? Highgrade and his grandad will be most upset if it does.

I miss Highgrade.

 

Wildlife -- It hasn't evolved to cope with it. LED's sound like an eco-Godsend, but if they are close to daylight spectra and people leave loads of them on because they are so cheap to run then it will get worse.

 

You're mis-reporting him: He used the word 'like' -- it's a simile.

 

So are LED streetlights causing more light pollution because they are more efficient`?

 

Exmoor is a dark sky reserve

 

Dark skies or light skies, this has nothing to do with building the stadium, start a new thread star gayzerz

 

Well, people are complaining we are getting off-topic, but, if the colour of a light closely resembles daylight it is likely to create more of a problem. Those old yellow sodium lights were horrible to our way of thinking, but they would not interfere with wildlife quite so much because insects are not good at seeing the red end of the spectrum. This is probably an understudied topic and I'm not an expert.

 

Oh yeah? I've not heard any wildlife complaining.

 

Sort of. They are more energy efficient than sodium vapour lamps (NaVL), but NaVL's gave out light in a reasonably "tight" frequency range (hence their yellow colour) and could be screened by filters on the 'scope. The (cheapest) LED's push out a much wider range of frequencies (hence their "whiteish" light) and are much, much brighter than "traditional" NaVL's. Something that's always frustrated me is that it shouldn't be beyond the wit/ingenuity of man if using LEDs to have a phased switching on/off of the LEDs with time - do we really need all the LEDs on at 01h00 in the morning?

 

Just noticed something.. the two apartment blocks being built in the gap on Vicarage Road. Can't believe i didnt spot them going up when i was over for the Bristol City LC game!


So there goes my plan of bridging over the road for the Vic Stand expansion

 

The colour temperature of light is expressed in kelvin. Daylight is around 6400k. The sodium lamps of old street lighting is around 2700k. Therefore the lower the temperature the more red the light appears to our eyes and the higher the temperature the bluer the light apparatus. Lamps and LEDs are sold in warm white, natural white and cool white, ranging from 2700k to 6400k. Colour rendering is poor at the lower colour temperatures.

 

Taken from from the Wobby website:

Look how far we’ve come!


January 11, 1963]

Ice battle continues

Watford experimented with a road burning machine on their pitch on Saturday morning and again on Monday but as the machine was spreading too much diesel oil over the ground, operation “de-frost” – costing £2 10s an hour – was abandoned. It was the second experiment that had proved unsatisfactory, for the pellets Watford tentatively tried out last week were found, on analysis, to contain ingredients harmful to the grass. Later in the week Watford tried yet another method of ridding the field of its icy coating. It was an agricultural “Rotavator” as used by Brighton on their pitch. Watford were eminently satisfied with the results achieved.

 

Perhaps better suited to the history thread - but maybe that's what this picture shows?

 

Buy the apartments and pull them down. Job done, Stevo!

 

Haha this made me chuckle.

 

Intrigued by this. When I started going in 1970 there was a wall with shards of glass running along the back of the Vicarage Road terrace. Does anyone remember the fence shown in the photo or when it was replaced?

 

The fence was replaced with a brick wall sometime in the 1960's.. though of course the turnstile blocks were always of a brick construction.