moonlight too bright?

I have a Coralife 1W moonlight. This one: http://www.arcatapet.com/item.cfm?cat=9402
I believe it's a Luxeon LED, but I'm not certain of that. What I do know is that it's not your typical type LED and that it's really REALLY bright, and I'm wondering if it's just too much light for my critters, corals, and eventual fish. I have removed it from the little plastic casing and mounted it (on it's little circuit board) in my lighting canopy.

My tank: 24g Nanocube...approx. 16" deep x 18" x 18". The LED is mounted in the canopy, which is only about 2" above the water; it shines through a clear plastic cover/canopy.

It's so bright that I decided to install a potentiometer to be able to turn down the intensity, but this seriously changes the color and/or temp of the light...it's my understanding that 470 nanometer wavelength is the true wavelength of actual moonlight.

When it's on at full power (normal without the pot I installed) it looks GREAT, and there are definitely areas of complete dark shadows within my liverock, but most areas are really bright. I've heard fish like a little "nightlight," but I just don't know if this is too bright, and I don't know about how fish "sleep" or rest. I also don't know how it'll affect my critters, corals, snails, etc.

FWIW, the LFS folks told me that fish and critters aren't affected by that wavelength of light, that "they can't see it" and that it won't do any harm having it up all the way. I dunno...

Please provide input on any of this. Thank you.

Tim

 

If you feel that it is to bright try putting a couple layers of window screen over it to defuse the light some.............. John

 

IMO it does not affect the critters but you could put it on a timer so it is not on all night

 

I've seen those on nano's, very bright. I would go lower in brightness though, so everything can rest tightly at night. I was running my moonlights on 12v and lowered it to 6v with an adapter I hacked up. ;D

 

any pics?

 

I wanted to take some pics, but it just won't work. :-[ I have an older camera, and it just doesn't pick up the weaker setting for the moonlight at all. It picks up the moonlight on full blast, but even that's a lame picture. Even so, everyone's computer moniter would display it differently, probably. I can make my screen look much brighter just by tilting my laptop screen back a bit. Posting the pictures on here wouldn't really work as I don't quite have the technology to get high quality pics. (waiting to get rich so I can buy a digital SLR)

Hmm, perhaps that's a clue itself...the fact that even the full blast setting only partially shows up on the camera. Maybe not though, my camera is not very good.

I do have pictures of the tank that I just posted earlier, but daylight shots. You can check them out in my gallery. There's not much in there right now, just cleanup crew, a serpant star, three shrimp, and coral (spiny cupped pectinia, according to LFS) + some tiny polyps.

I think I'll go with my gut feeling for now and keep the lights down a bit; if it was bothering me enough to post to ask about it, then it's probably a valid issue.

Thanks for the input everybody; if anyone else has input, I'd love to hear it.