Can a electronic ballast be controlled with a standard relay?

[GoldDigger]

Yep it took me alittle to get my head around that a second if 1,000 milliseconds, and a millisecond if 1,000 microseconds, don't use these small figures very often anymore.

Be glad you are not an elementary particle physicist or laser induced fusion engineer. You would end up thinking about
milliseconds, microseconds, nanoseconds, picoseconds, femtoseconds and attoseconds (10^-18 seconds.)