Bangkok's Nightlight On The 84th Floor

Vertical unlit LED panels encircle the 84th floor of Baiyoke II tower

The term "nightlight" usually refers to a small plug-in device that provides a glow in the dark to illuminate a hallway or bathroom, but I've come to call the large LED display atop Baiyoke II (Thailand's tallest building) one, too - the highest one in the Kingdom, anyway.

The LED display at dusk

Above the 83rd floor - which holds the revolving outdoor observation deck - a collar of vertical strip panels encircle the 84th floor at the top of the structure. You get a good view of it in the top photo, but I've not seen it from that vantage point myself (evidently from another nearby building) so I borrowed the unrestricted image from Wikimedia.

The "collar" encircling the 84th floor area doesn't move - you move around the display as you stand on the observation deck, and during the daytime hours there's not much to observe, to be honest.

Each of the vertical panels holds somewhere around 40 round of the round, sealed LED panels, each containing 45 LEDs; 15 red, green and blue lights in each display.

I don't know the wattage or lumens put out by each display, but they're clearly visible for a great distance from the ground - and that's saying something with the haze that often blankets the Big Mango.

Below is what you'd see looking up from the observation deck in the daytime hours, and below that is a close-up look at an individual round LED unit.

Vertical panels of LED units

Detail of one of the LED units

Because these three colors are what are used in creating many visual display units (think your boxy old color TV picture tube, for example) most anything can be splashed around the "screen" around the top of Baiyoke II: advertisements, photos, graphics, moving images, etc.- and so it does, far into the night.

It's a safe bet I've got more photos of the display in action at night, but I'll post those another day after I've found them.

We'll re-visit the tower itself again soon, too...there's a lot more to it than the "nightlight" perched on top of it.