Day/night cycle?

[Starscream]

If there wasn't I would do something similar to daylight longer amount of light in the summer shorter in the winter.

I'm not sure if that would be accurate for ball pythons, though? Where they're from, their photoperiod doesn't really change much. What does change is the seasons -- the dry and wet seasons, specifically. Here's a site that has the sunlight hours for Accra, Ghana throughout the year: http://www.accra.climatemps.com/sunlight.php . Of course, that's only one area of their natural range, but as you can see it only fluctuates by about 30 minutes.

I personally do provide night temperature drops. It's certainly not necessary in captivity, but since I have the ability to do so with my Herpstat2, I figured I would experiment with it and see how my snake responds.

My lights turn off at 7PM, and then at 7:30PM the temperatures drop over a course of 30 minutes (I could probably extend that time but I don't know if it would make a difference) to be about 80F on the hot side and 78F on the cold. There's a rock under the heat panel that holds heat for a few hours after the heat goes down, so she still has access to heat at night for a period of time. Maze typically comes out to explore sometime after 8:30PM, and keeps going until after I've gone to bed, except after a feed or while in shed.

Lights turn back on at 7AM, and the heat ramps back up to 86F on the hot side by 8AM. I'm usually asleep when the lights turn back on, so I honestly couldn't tell you if she's active during that time on the regular. A few months back I did wake up a few hours early and she was still scooting around until closer to 9AM. That was an isolated incident, and I don't have cameras hooked up to prove if that's a regular thing for her, though.

Again, not necessary, this is just what I do.