Synchronized blinking
The first time I saw this sight, I was riding across northern Indiana in the early morning hours, awoken by my wife as she drove. Neither of us knew what it was. The eeriness of it is the closest I've felt to a UFO encounter, but now, 15 years later, these sights are common. On that drive across Indiana, she woke me again near dawn to tell me what they were. Windmills.
The red lights, of course, are safety lights to warn planes, and recently while driving across Kansas in the dark and thinking how glad I was not to have this blinking array out my bedroom window, I supposed it could be important for the lights to all blink together. If each light blinked on its own schedule, it would create a continuous scintillation, which could be even more disruptive:
So I have some questions:
- Is it a safety consideration for the lights to blink together, or aesthetic?
- Is synchronized blinking required when building a wind farm?
- What's the mechanism for synchronizing the lights?
If you know any of the answers, I'd be happy to hear from you.