Principles of lighting

1. Important Terms

2. Why do starts twinkle?
• Star as seen from space
• Light deviates from its path as it travels through
various layers of atmosphere
• Star as observed from earth.

3. Refraction
• Refraction is the redirection of a wave (light) as
it passes from one medium to another.

4. Laws of Refraction
• Snell’s law
• “The ratio of the sine of the angle of incidence to the sine of the angle of
refraction is a constant, for the light of a given colour and for the given pair
of media”.
• The incident ray, reflected ray and the normal, to the interface of any
two given mediums; all lie in the same plane.

5. Snell’s law
• N1 = refractive index of medium 1
• N2 = refractive index of medium 1
• θ1 = angle of incidence
• θ2 = angle of refraction
n =
𝑐
𝑣
=
𝑉𝑒𝑙𝑜𝑐𝑖𝑡𝑦 𝑜𝑓 𝑙𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡 𝑖𝑛 𝑣𝑎𝑐𝑢𝑢𝑚
𝑣𝑒𝑙𝑜𝑐𝑖𝑡𝑦 𝑜𝑓 𝑙𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡 𝑖𝑛 𝑚𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑢𝑚