I was a bit bored earlier so I figured there was nothing better to do on a Saturday evening than drive around my locality and look for some mercury...
...found some!
Pure mercury, this one's going rather green.
Mercury and SON. A few of them are like this. The funny thing is, a few seconds after I took a photo of one, the SON lamp went out. Now, going on the logical assumption that the mercury lamps are older than the SON, this attests to their long life.
Outside the fire station. This is another installation that the presumably older mercury has outlasted the SON, which was cycling.
Left the best till last. Hunters Quay Holiday Village caravan park is FULL of Gamma 6s running Mercury. There must have been 10+, and they're pretty much the sole light source. I've only got the one just now, but at a quieter time I'm determined to photograph more. This particular one was doing a fabulous job of illuminating a tree, as the pole was far too high.
The more I look the more I realise there's actually a load around here, it may even be more common than SOX. I do like the technical aspects of mercury but as a light source, it is useless.
It just doesn't seem to light anything more than three feet away from the bulb! I'm assuming the lamps I saw here were all the colour corrected kind, as when I attempted to analyse the spectral lines, it was mostly a blur of violet, green, yellow and red, which would make sense as I believe fluorescence looks this way on a spectro.
PS. What is the lantern type in the first two images? And, does anyone know what the ones on the fire station are likely to be?