Sports lighting is an essential aspect of modern sports facilities, whether they are indoor or outdoor. The main goal of sports lighting is to provide adequate illumination for players, officials and audiences, contributing to the visibility of the game target, competitors, and surrounding background. Nighttime sports, such as baseball, football and other sports activities require uniformly distributed lighting to allow gameplay. The illumination of sports venues including football fields, soccer fields, baseball fields, and tennis courts is a complicated process that requires both quantitative and qualitative factors to be considered.
Factors of Quality
Qualitative factors are essential to the success of sports lighting. These factors include achieving a specific level of illumination, distribution of light, uniformity of illuminance, color rendering index, color contrast, modeling, and luminaire efficiencies. The beam patterns of the delivered illumination, effects of light trespass and spill light, human perception of opposing players, revealing the spin of a ball and its path of travel, glare, cost of lighting installations, and life-cycle costs of lamps are other factors that must be considered when designing sports lighting systems.
Quality of Light
The quality of sports lighting is also important. Lighting designers have learned that the size and speed of an object significantly impact the ability of person to locate and detect an object. Therefore, objects such as baseball or football which are smaller and move at high velocities compared to players, are much more challenging to see under low or reduced lighting conditions.
The illuminating Engineering Society of North America(IESNA) and other organizations have established sports field illumination intensity and uniformity minimums for different sports that are frequently used for these purposes. Many customers require that such standards be met by the company installing the sports lighting system.
Uniformity is another crucial aspect of sports lighting. It measures the relationship of the illumination over the area, and the lighting designer, often with the aid of a computer program, selects the quality and type of lights to meet the values that are applicable for fields. Uniformity of illuminance is vital importance, as is the illumination level, coupled with the ever-present demand for optimum performance at the smallest possible cost. In the sports lighting field, both vertical and horizontal illuminances must be considered both, as for optimum video camera operation.
Finally, it takes into consideration conventional arrangement of pole locations, mounting heights and aiming angles. The field of sports lighting has developed over time into a form of outdoor lighting that has characteristics much like outdoor area lighting yet distinct from those requirements that come into play when lighting athletic playing fields. In conclusion, sports lighting is an essential aspect of modern sports facilities that requires careful consideration of various qualitative and quantitative factors to achieve the best possible results.
