There are several guys at my field with night flyers (and I'm going to convert a trainer to it as soon as I have time). I've been out with them several times.

The most popular night flyer here is the Sig LT-40. The wing and tail structure make it nearly ideal.

The best working setups involved taking the covering off the outter most wing bay and the wingtips. Some kind of reflective covering, like chome was put on the inner most rib, and transparent red or green was put on each wingtip, red on the left, green on the right.

No one here uses the Ram system, instead, guys either use ultrabright LEDs (from a website called something like ultrabrightled.com. I haven't checked the url thoug), or using some bright bulbs from radio shack. Usually 2 blubs in each wingtip. You want as little structure outside of the bulbs as possible, so you can see one or both bulbs from any angle, top, bottom, or end-on. And the transparent covering tends to "glow" giving you a big, lit, reference.

The same treatment is given to the vertical tail, with one bulb set inside the vertical, and yellow covering used on the tail.

Keep most of the rest of the plane white. The light coming from the tail tends to hit the horizontal stab, making it visible in some cases, and the light from the wings will help light up parts of the plane as well.

Landing isn't that hard, really. Once the plane gets close to the ground, the bulbs in the wingtips are bright enough to actually light up the ground a little, so you can see when to flair.

Some guys use electronic swtiches on a 5th channel, some just use a switch on the side of the plane.

You really don't want ot power your lights from your RX pack, use a secondary pack. And you need a lot of capacity. Using the lights from RS or LEDs, you can use a 4.8v nicad or nimh pack.

Basic acrobatics look wild, loops and espeically rolls are just really cool.

I've also seen it done with just one light on the plane, on the tail. The guy doing it didn't care if the plane crashed, and had experience flying at night prior. It was pretty funny, really. (and the plane was eventually totalled, but mostly due to the flat spin down to the runway than anything to do with the lights)

Anyway, for your first night flights, the slower the plane flys, the better off you'll be.

You don't have to wait until total dark. Most of the nightflying here just happens as a continuation of the evening flying. Dusk isn't really a problem here. It might have some to do with where the sun sets at your field though.