@James: Is only the accelerated arctube blackening in scandium lamps causing the rapid lumen depreciation?

Almost giving me album cover vibes.

Look for a brown sandy land, a little bottom left to the dropped pin, where there are giant rusty iron pipes. You will see "HELP", "LAPD" and even a misspelled "Traffic" written using those rods.

I know that other countries have other styles of igniters that might be wired differently but I am specifically asking about the US style metal halide ignitors.

1: Output

What is output by one of these? It a high voltage pulse or is it more like a continuous output?

2: Innards

What is inside? Is it just a simple few components or does it have chips and triacs and stuff like that? How is the output achieved?

3: Wattages

What is inside that is different for different wattages?

I have next to no knowledge on this and I would like to know if I could maybe use igniters for other purposes or use other things as ignitors. Just curious. Thanks! 

Medved's answers are always impeccable, but I can add a little more:

2. The single-pin slimline tubes indeed still have a hot filament cathode inside.  In the old days some manufacturers made them with neon-style cold cathodes and indeed the life is then longer, but efficacy is much worse because the voltage drop in front of a cold cathode is much higher than from a hot cathode.  Such lamps then have to be run on different control gear that offers a necessarily higher voltage.  Moreover the cold cathode electrodes only achieve longer life when run at quite low discharge currents.  It is not realistic to achieve the same high luminous flux from a cold-cathode fluorescent tube as the hot cathode types.

Ahh I see, so it is technically possible but not very practical or efficient.

I don't see anything, what am I looking for?

Is the ballast CWA or HX? HX don't requires capacitor for optimal performance.

I heard that if you open this in apple maps, they have blurred out that area and it looks like a blank land. It is only visible in Google maps.

Oh sorry! There was an empty plastic can inside the fixture, so I thought there was an ignitor. I think the fixture was retrofitted later on, and this assembly was thrown inside (the fixture was huge, you could store 5 ballasts and lamps inside). The 'ignitor' must have come from the HPS retrofit.

LATE UPDATE: She didn’t go because she didn’t, and still doesn’t have any symptoms.