Perot Museum of Nature and Science - A founding partner, Perot provides parking for all volunteers in Dallas who participate in the bird collision surveys. Their dedicated, Community Engagement Collections Manager Tim Brys connects with local buisnesses downtown to encourage them to turn off their lights. At the museum, you can find a display on Lights Out, Texas with specimen collected from the surveys.
Get your glow on in Schiff Family Great Hall with LED swings, interactive floor projections, ocean-themed interactive light panels that create patterns that mimic ocean life, and a jellyfish celebration in lights.
Collisions with buildings kill more birds than any other single human factor besides habitat loss and domestic cats. In urban areas, the problem worsens during periods of migration. Most neo-tropical songbirds migrate at night to avoid turbulence in the air and they navigate by the stars. Passing over cities, they are often attracted to artificial lights and frequently strike transparent or reflective windows. The blow can be fatal or it can leave the birds injured and vulnerable to predators and street sweepers.
Lights Out DC is patterned after highly successful lights-out programs in Chicago, Toronto, Boston, New York City, and Baltimore, to name a few. Our work has been featured in publications by the BBC, Washington Post, and Huffington Post.
Tucked into the foothills under the dark sky, the glow of lights can be seen for miles. Just under a mile of walking trail, the illumination of cottonwoods, boxelders and pine trees line the pathway past the Green Farm Barn and through the Crossroads Garden, Deer Creek Discovery Children's Play Area and 1880s Hildebrand Ranch homestead. There is the option of an alternative path for those who want to take a shorter stroll.
But we want more than one light to shine on our Christmas tree or along the roofs of our homes. If you want to connect multiple light bulbs to the same power source, there are two ways to do that: either attach the lights in series or in parallel.
When lights are attached in series, the electricity passes from the power source to the first light, and then from light to light until it returns to the power source. In this setup, when a filament within any one bulb blows out, it creates an open circuit in the wiring. As we mentioned earlier, when a circuit is incomplete, or open, electricity fails to pass through any of the wire, causing all the lights to go out.
When lights are attached in parallel, each light is on its own circuit to the power source. If one filament burns out, it has no effect on the remaining lights, as they each continue to be in a closed circuit with the power source. Check out the difference.
This way, when one series of bulbs becomes defective -- say, from a loose bulb -- it should have no effect on any of the other series of bulbs, since they are in parallel to the defective series. This is why sometimes only one portion of your lights will become defective, while others will remain functional. When additional strings of lights are attached to the end of a string, these lights are added in parallel to the original strand.
A shunt is any device that allows current to continue flowing through a circuit by creating a path of lower resistance than the original path. In incandescent holiday lights, shunts are small wires wrapped beneath the filament. Initially, they are coated with a substance that makes them an insulator. In other words, electricity cannot pass across the shunt as long as the filament exists, because the coating gives the shunt a higher resistance initially than the filament, and the electrical current avoids the shunt in order to find the path of least resistance through the filament.
If the filament burns out, however, the high temperature from the burnout will cause the substance coating the shunt to melt off, revealing the lower resistance wire beneath. Now the shunt has gone from an insulator to a conductor, and current passes along shunt, keeping the circuit closed, and the remaining lights burning. Check it out below.
Fuses are important safety features for many electrical appliances, but most of us don't even know that they're there. In holiday lights, the fuse can be found near the part of the strand that plugs into the wall, often called -- and I'm not making this up -- the male end of the wire. Normally, the fuse is accessible through a small plastic door in the plug that can be opened and closed for replacing the fuse.
LEDs are wired in series-parallel just like the traditional bulbs we described above. Unlike incandescent lights, however, LEDs do not typically make use of shunts. When incandescent light bulbs fail, the missing filament causes an open circuit -- a drastic increase in resistance too high for the current to pass across. On the other hand, when an LED fails, it typically short circuits, creating a path of lesser resistance. This essentially takes the place of a shunt, making shunts unnecessary for LEDs.
The Visual Comfort Architectural Lighting Collection has gained broad recognition for balancing passion for every design detail with an appreciation for the way our fixtures illuminate a space. By working closely with lighting and interior designers to understand their needs and to solve their toughest challenges, this collection offers specification-grade lighting solutions from linear task and accent lighting to recessed downlights engineered to deliver critically defined light.
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