Saturday, February 09, 2008
Big Ball of LED fun dropped for New Year's Eve in New York
Sign Builder: This Past New Years Eve celebrated more than "out with the old" and "in with the new." The recent party in the Big Apple also celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of the crystal ball that slid down the pole of the roof of the original New York Times building...
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3 comments:
Fifty feet below times square!? I had no idea. Thats pretty nifty. I never even wondered where the ball goes to rest after its done its duty for the year. Although I do remember that every time I pass by it in December I can't help but thinking its so tiny, so it must not take up that much space underground. I do remember when it switched over from lightbulbs to LED's. I never realized how great of an invention LEDs were.
The most astonishing part of this article to me is the low wattage. I first imagined that the old ball would be far more than 30,000 watts. It also surprises me that the new ball is almost 3 times brighter and only uses 15,000 watts. I did the math on 15,000 watts / 9,567 LEDs = 1.5 watts per LED. That's pretty surprising to me. I had no idea that LEDs were only 1.5 watts. If hypothetically we used all LED lights in the theatre some day we could get rid of our dimmer room.
I've seen the ball in person, not seen it drop, but seen it before hand when they put it up, and it's pretty big. It's cool that they redid it with color mixing LEDs, it's just keeping pace with technology. It's always looked cool, but this only improves that. Also, the pyro at midnight is fun.
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