An Artificial Sun In A Manageable Size

The sun is our planet’s source of natural illumination, and though we’ve mastered making artificial light sources, it remains extremely difficult to copy our nearby star. As if matching the intensity wasn’t enough, its spectral quality, collimation, and atmospheric scattering make it an special challenge. [Victor Poughon] has given it a go though, using a bank of LEDs and an interesting lens system.

We’re used to lenses being something that can be bought off-the-shelf, but this design eschews that convenience by having the lenses manufactured and polished as an array, by JLC. The scattering is taken care of by a sheet of inkjet printer film, and the LEDs are mounted on a set of custom PCBs.

The result is certainly a very bright light, and one whose collimation delivers a sun-like effect of coming from a great distance. It may not be as bright as the real thing, but it’s certainly something close. If you’d like something to compare it to, it’s not the first such light we’ve featured.

8 thoughts on “An Artificial Sun In A Manageable Size

  1. This very exact project has been high up my todo list for ages! Nicely done.

    Apart from a higher intensity I suspect you also need LEDs with better color rendering, as a CRI of 95 is actually quite bad still.

    I would also love to create an optical system that takes more than one LED into account.

    I wasn’t aware that it’s so easy to order custom lenses, that’s great to know.

  2. It’s not extremely difficult to replicate. Literally all you have to do is get something that is a good black body radiator to the a high enough temperature.

    Hollywood uses arc lights in a lot of cases and the light blends exceedingly well with sunlight.

  3. When this was first posted, I saw it directly under the featured article “General Fusion Claims Success With Magnetized Target Fusion “, and that juxtaposition was a nice chuckle.

    That aside, this is a nice design. I wonder how nice this sort of light would be to have in a stage lighting context, or for miniatures/stop motion.

    And of course, it’s always great to see that we’re advancing our ability to pull a Commodore Schmidlapp on somebody.

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