this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2025
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Omg this is awesome! Is this photo overexposed or did those seachlights realy look like laserbeams? Also: were they moving?
They can easily look like that with just a bit of fog, I have a consumer grade LEP flashlight and it's literally a half mile lightsaber in certain conditions
Searchlights of that sort are pretty focused, so they probably looked pretty close in reality to the photo, though I can't say for sure since I know only a little about WW2 anti-air searchlights.
They definitely would have been moving!
They’re probably carbon arc lamps. They’re super, super bright. A bit of mist or smoke in the air, as a cool summer evening might have, and it’ll look like that.
The lights would move trying to catch a plane and then lock onto it so the gunners can target it.
Just to have some numbers: A German 150 cm FLAK Spotlight contained a carbon arc lamp with a power of 15 kW (200 A @ 78 V) generating light with an intensity of 1 Gcd (1,000,000,000 cd).
Wikipedia.org: Scheinwerfer
Flugzeug-lexikon.de – Flakscheinwerfer
Super bright is somewhat understated.