Over the years, I've gone through phases of experimenting with lighted boomerangs. Here are some of my experiences.

Glow-in-the-Dark Failures

The first thing I tried way back when was good old-fashioned phosphorescence. I tried glow-in-the-dark paint, and at one point I tried melting a glow-in-the-dark plastic souvenir cup and dripping the molten plastic all over a boomerang. With these boomerangs, you could see them in a dark room, but because of light pollution, you really couldn't see them well enough on the boomerang field. The surrounding street lights and such just made it too bright for the glow-in-the-dark stuff to stand out.

LEDs

My next try was with LEDs. A Radio Shack "Super Bright" LED and a calculator battery made for a pretty visible boomerang. I never got around to fashioning a proper mounting or on/off switch, instead opting to just tape the LED and battery to a boomerang. Predictably, I soon lost the electronics during a hard landing at night.

Astrojax

In the Summer of 2003, we discovered a new toy called Astrojax, and bought a couple of sets of the "Saturn" lighted version. We played with these neat swinging toys a lot, but I never considered using them for lighting a boomerang until I was in a Radio Shack to buy some more LEDs and batteries and saw that they also sold the lighted Astrojax. Since I had boomerang lighting in my head at that moment, the epiphany hit. I immediately made a new 3-blader so I could cut just the right size hole in it to mount a single orb of the Astrojax toy. This little sphere adds a bit of wind resistance, so you'll need a pretty hefty boomerang and a good strong toss. Because there is an LED on the top and the bottom, you can easily spot the boomerang whichever side is facing you during the flight. It isn't so bright that people will think a UFO is flying around the field, but it is easy enough to spot that you can definitely have some boomerang fun at night. This is a really nice lighting method, because you don't have to destroy the toy to mount it on the boomerang. You can easily reassemble it when you are done night throwing. The "Saturn" Astrojax model is what you need, and you can get them for around $10 at Radio Shack. This means you can get the electronics for 3 lighted boomerangs, each with different color LEDs (red, yellow, green) for around $3.33 a piece. 

Body Lights

Recently, I found something that made throwing at night easier than ever. I had heard of "Belly Lights" on the BoomerangTalk Yahoo group, but didn't really know what they were until when on a Christmas shopping trip to Fry's I saw some Halloween-themed "body lights" on sale. Since these ghosts, pumpkins, and witches were now out of season, they were on sale for 90 cents a piece, whereas they are normally around $3 a piece. These things turned out to be excellent for putting in the middle hole of a 3-blader. All you need to do is use transparent tape to secure the light in the hole and make sure not to tape over the switch that will stick out the back of the hole. This makes it easy to turn the lights on and off with a simple twist of the switch. These lights are great and I highly recommend them, but I have to admit that there is a problem with my current method, and that is that since there is only a light on the top of the boomerang, it can be hard to spot when it is hovering down and the bottom is all you see. I'll have to work on mounting one each on the top and the bottom and balancing things so the spin isn't too badly affected.

Glow-Sticks

Another find at Fry's was some cheap glow-sticks. At 8 inches, I got some rather large ones so I had to use a large traditional-style boomerang to be able to carry them. It would have been easier using a router, but for starting out, I just jigsawed a slot the same size and shape as the glow stick, put the stick in the slot and used some clear packing tape to secure it in place. So far I've only used a blue glow-stick, and light pollution again rears its ugly head. The glowing blue is a little tough to pick out against the night sky. Hopefully the red and yellow glow-sticks will be easier to spot.

Fireworks Sparklers

What's Next?

I'd still like to try new ideas, like a multi-LED boomerang with proper mounting and an on/off switch. Not only is it lots of fun just to throw at night, but the final goal of all this is to get cool pictures. I hope to have some high resolution long-exposure photos of full flights using each of these lighting techniques. I've still got to learn a lot about the manual exposure settings on my camera, but the idea of these photos is the reason I made sure I got a camera that can do long exposures. The best-looking of the photos will probably be the sparklers, but since fireworks are illegal in Dallas, I'll have to wait until a trip to the country to try this.

Photos