Lighting Questions - LEDs at Night and Infrared Nightvision

[geeforce]

Hey all - first off, thank you so much for all of the incredible information on this forum. I became a new first-time owner of a beautiful 6 month old female a few weeks ago, and thanks to your info and guides I was ready with a nice habitat right away when she got home! Temps/humidity are still a bit of a work in progress to reach a "hands-off" / autonomous point, but I'm pretty pleased with where they're at most of the time and never let them fall below minimums (50%, 78' cool side 87' warm side). Successfully feeding f/t rat pups with no issues, and even handling is going well as far as I can tell.

So, that all said, I'm already looking at my next steps for the enclosure, since it's definitely more of a display case than a hide bin (glass tank with lots of fake foliage). The first step is that I would like to set up some lighting. However, I'm trying to be cognizant of the ball python's natural day/night lighting patterns. There are a few guides on here for installing LEDs into an enclosure, but are those intended for night time use? Will the LEDs seem too much like daylight, and throw off the nocturnal instincts? (I would keep them a cool dim color)

The second step is potentially creating a nightvision camera to check in on her when I'm out, since she pretty exclusively comes out at night. It looks like the most common way to DIY a nightvision camera is to remove the infrared filter from a regular webcam and flood the target area with infrared light. Infrared is invisible to the human eye, but I have no idea if the snake can see it. Would it seem like a bright spotlight, or would they interpret it as heat, or something? Has anyone done anything similar?

Oh, and obligatory picture - this was at the expo picking her up for the first time. Much less shy now, and getting more comfortable every day!

[Mr. Misha]

Hi, my suggestion to you is to buy yourself a LED with multicolored option so you can switch from a regular white light to red for night time viewing. Ball Pythons cannot see the color red. I believe their spectrum of color they can "see" is blue to around green. They also use their heat pits but that works more like an infrared gun or camera.

LED Thread
http://ball-pythons.net/forums/showthread.php?t=210139

Colors BP can "see"
http://ball-pythons.net/forums/showthread.php?t=208992

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G920A using Tapatalk

[geeforce]

Very interesting, thank you! Your LED thread was actually one of the ones I came across, but the "snakes can't see red" is the answer I was looking for.

Any thoughts or speculation on the infrared / nightvision topic? One thought I had after making this post was that enough people seem to use IR heat lamps 24/7 with no ill effects - I wonder if such a lamp could even do double duty and provide the "nightvision light" that I need. I'm currently running a CHE instead of a light, but may pick one up to test.

[Tsanford]

Also if your using leds, don't get the big tube florecent style housing. Get LED strip lighting which uses surface mount leds. I wired up a rack with them, and they are maybe 1/16 thin!

This brand is good, they also have one that changes 10+ colors with a remote!

http://www.amazon.com/Triangle-Bulbs.../dp/B005EHHLD8