Alan, I guess in my tank the corals get light from all angles. If I turn off one or more of the bulbs before the full photoperiod, the coral loses light from that angle.
What you propose covers the same area, just for less total time than what I use. I had considered this a long time ago, but realized I wanted to do it to make corals happy and make them "feel at home". Well, we all know that the corals don't actually care about home and they don't experience "happy". The light needs to provide energy to elicit a certain physical response within the photosynthetic zooxanthallae living in the coral tissue. The light moving around over the top of my tank isn't going to do a better job of supplying photons to these organisms, and in fact it would lower the overall contact between photons and algae, potentially reducing the amount of carbohydrates produced and thus made available to feed the coral. (=bad)
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Brad
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