At 42.3 billion candela, the Luxor Sky Beam is the strongest beam of light in the world. Using computer designed, curved mirrors to collect the light from 39 xenon lamps and focus them into one intense, narrow beam, engineers say that a person could read a newspaper by Luxor’s Sky Beam from ten miles up. On a clear night, the Sky Beam is visible up to 275 miles (443 km) away by aircraft at cruising altitude, such as over Los Angeles.
Each of the 39 lamps is a 7,000 watt Xenotech fixture costing about $1,200. The system costs $51 an hour to operate, with $20 per hour of that just for its 315,000 watts of electricity. The beam has operated reliably since first enabled on October 15, 1993, and is an FAA designated navigational landmark for aviators.
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Famous quotes containing the words luxor, sky and/or beam:
“What though the traveler tell us of the ruins of Egypt, are we so sick or idle that we must sacrifice our America and today to some man’s ill-remembered and indolent story? Carnac and Luxor are but names, or if their skeletons remain, still more desert sand and at length a wave of the Mediterranean Sea are needed to wash away the filth that attaches to their grandeur. Carnac! Carnac! here is Carnac for me. I behold the columns of a larger
and purer temple.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There’s something wonderfully exciting about the quiet sing song of an aeroplane overhead with all the guns in creation lighting out at it, and searchlights feeling their way across the sky like antennae, and the earth shaking snort of the bombs and the whimper of shrapnel pieces when they come down to patter on the roof.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”
—Bible: New Testament Jesus, in Matthew, 7:3.
From the Sermon on the Mount.