TheSkySearchers-Welcome!

When I look up at the night sky naked eye on a perfectly clear night with no moon. and wait for a few minutes for my eyes to adjust the night sky is like a really dark dull kind of blue-ish cyan shade of color.
its faint but noticable. my area is bortle 6 or so approximately. I dont see an orange brown or yellow color in the sky anywhere.

its definitely not just straight black or gray.

Also I dont see any kind of fuzz or hazy noise in my vision when i'm in near or total darkness that ive seen people talk or ask about on the internet my vision

is my vision or eyesight just clipped darker than other peoples vision? Or does my brain just filter out noise better for some reason than other people?

Whats normal to see?

I live in bortle 5 skies sandwiched in-between 2 towns. I can see orange light pollution north and south yet mostly the sky seems a dark grey black, if that makes sense.

Admittedly though I have on occasion seen a dark blue hue to the skies. I cant answer your question but I can say I've seen the same here in the UK

I have bortle 6 sky at home. It is always different shades of gray, never black. During dusk and down it does appear dark blue or greyish blue, but not during astronomical darkens.

Since the greyish sky color comes from light pollution the tint you will see will depend on the type of artificial lighting is used around you. I can imagine if colder LED lights are used than the sly may have bluish tint.

Always shades of gray to my eye(s).

is it possible I just have an especially larger portion of cone to rod receptors in my eyes?
giving me slightly more color perception in the dark than someone with more proportion of rods? since not everyone has identical number of receptors in their eyes right?

Theres basically no chance of dark adaptation where I live. Not even a small percentage. the light pollution is so bad its even worse than some bortle 9 "examples" i've seen!

Hello realflow,

the aquacolor disc, or bluish-cyan disc, appears to me after I have been using brigh red light when writing the observing notes. It takes some short time to disappear, and some more time to become dark adapted again.
It is the complementary color illusion to the red light.

Another color illusion are the faint brownish skies after the dusk, but they disappear fastn. The brownish color is complementary to the dark blue skies during the dusk.

Nothing to worry about,
JG

Count me in. I too see usually bluish sky. In the east, there is always a orangish/purplish light pollution. I see that same colour all over if it's a foggy night or the clouds are very low. The light pollution map says that my sky is Bortle 5, but to my knowledge, that comes from data from 2015, and there has been lot of changes. (I wish an update would happen soon.)

realflow100 wrote: ↑Tue Apr 06, 2021 4:08 pm... the night sky is like a really dark dull kind of blue-ish cyan shade of color. ... Also I dont see any kind of fuzz or hazy noise in my vision ... is my vision or eyesight just clipped darker than other peoples ...

Interesting questions. I have no answers. I will note that we call color blindness "Daltonism" because it was first described by John Dalton about 1800. Aristotle did not mention it. I mean, people just get used to whatever they see or not and manage as best they do or not, but without actually investigating this empirically in a statistical population, there is no easy way to know. I believe that perception happens mostly in the brain. I know from reseach I have read that our common optical illusions are not universal. Some people around the world are not fooled at all and others just do not see the same thing as we do. They interpret the spaces and lines differently than we do. Perception is learned.

j.gardavsky wrote: ↑Mon Apr 12, 2021 8:42 pm Hello realflow,

the aquacolor disc, or bluish-cyan disc, appears to me after I have been using brigh red light when writing the observing notes.
...

Something to note: there was an article in, I think, Sky and Telescope, some years ago re. the best color for that and it wasn't red. It was some particular wavelength of amber. And LEDs are avail. in that wavelength, but not common. Sorry I don't remember the specifics.

Anyhow, bright red is not ideal. Dim red is much better. I've been at star parties where some folks have had red lights as bright as a police spotlight and my eyes have had taken quite a time to readjust. I use a single dim led over my notebook.

my star tracker alt-az goto has a red led flashlight button on it built into the controller. Kinda useful.
and a dim red backlit LCD display. adjusted brightness so its most comfortable at night without being too bright.

@realflow100
Hi Realfow100,
The purplish color might simply be the hue imparted by your night or rod vision. The photoreceptor chemical is called rhodopsin and is also known as visual purple. It is quite normal for night vision to have a purplish hue which different people with variously describe in shades of dark blues or cyans.

Pupil dilation is almost immediate but dark adapted vision (a biochemical process) takes some time after you enter a dark area. At 5 mins it is starting to get sensitive but most people take about 20-40mins to reach peak sensitivity.

Any orange or red colour glow in the sky at night comes from bright artificial lighting. The natural starlit night sky is not bright enough to trigger cone colour vision in emission nebulae to the naked eye. It appears dark steely blue but as others have mentioned, never black. Even in my Bortle 1 - 2. skies it is not black. On a night of exceptional transparency last January, after about an hour outside more and more stars appeared in the gaps and the summer milky way through Orion and Canis Major was glowing with a bright arc through Puppis and Vela to Centaurus. But even the starless gaps between the faintest stars were not black.

It's general appearance has not changed with my declining vision over the past 42 years that I have been an amateur astronomer although at 57, my pupils can probably only dilate to 5.5mm whereas when I was 18 they could probably give me a good 7+ mm.

Joe

For me sometimes the background sky appears as a very deep blue, other times not. I wouldn't worry about it as color perception is quite variable between people and is also influenced by the predominant color pallet of your local environment as well. So folks from different physical environments will perceive colors a little differently. You will also as you change environments as it is something you adapt to.

my eye test results. I dont know what all of these mean. but i think i have some pretty strange vision problems! Need glasses.

realflow100 wrote: ↑Wed May 26, 2021 7:19 pm my eye test results. I dont know what all of these mean. but i think i have some pretty strange vision problems! Need glasses.

Disclaimer: I am not an optometrist, just a customer of an optometrist. Ask your optometrist for a definitive explanation. I'm surprised they didn't explain it to you on the spot.

I think the OD/OS is left and right eye. Why they don't just say left right is beyond me.
SPH is the spherical lens correction +0.5/+0.75 meaning you need weak reading glasses slightly different in each eye to read comfortably.
CYL is cylindrical. This is where your problem lies. This measures how cylindrical your eye lens is. The value of -2/-2.25 means you have a reasonable problem with astigmatism. If you look at a black line on a white page and slowly rotate the page, you'll see the edge of the line go from sharp to soft.

None of this will affect the sensitivity of your dark adapted vision however the astigmatism will make all the stars stretch in one direction and fainter stars will disappear as their light is spread. Your distance vision should be ok during the day but at night, a pair of distance glasses with the astigmatic correction built in will sharpen your vision while driving and help with the astronomy and prescription sunglasses will give you sharper vision while driving during the day.

My astigmatic value is around +1.25. I can see the night sky pretty well without glasses but the glasses really sharpen the star images while simultaneously absorbing some light.

Joe

I dont drive.
I can focus close up a couple inches from my face and far away just fine I think like 2 inches from my nose. I dont need to hold things that close to read them usually though LOL
if my astigmatism was corrected I could read tiny text from a whole foot away probably easily.

I probably dont need any distance/reading glasses just the astigmatism correction glasses mostly? Maybe my eyes were just slightly off of focus during some of the tests possibly from lazyness or misfocusing with my eye muscles (I can control them almost fully with willpower when I want to lol
Stars to me look slightly stretched vertically. almost like ghostly versions stacked on top of each other in different sizes. Same with the moon at night. looks almost doubled.

Vertical lines look almost perfectly sharp to me. and horizontal lines look moderately to somewhat blurry.

OD and SD are "oculus dexter" ("eye right") and "oculus sinister" (eye left). (Yes, the english word "sinister" comes from this - somehow left is associated with bad and right with good.)

@realflow100 : That sounds like me - that is: double images.
My second image (pretty same in both eyes) is about 2 mm "north-west" from the primary image at the normal reading distance.

I dont really see distinct double images. its just like vertical up and down stretched ghostly blurr of what im looking at on top of something. its pretty small. at normal reading distance its like 1 or 2mm top and bottom of something. like this text im typing here a foot or 2 away.
the text looks ALMOST sharp. but not quite. and theres like a ghostly blur underneath the text mostly. and slightly on top of it. really weird

realflow100 wrote: ↑Thu May 27, 2021 2:03 pm I dont really see distinct double images. its just like vertical up and down stretched ghostly blurr of what im looking at on top of something. its pretty small. at normal reading distance its like 1 or 2mm top and bottom of something. like this text im typing here a foot or 2 away.
the text looks ALMOST sharp. but not quite. and theres like a ghostly blur underneath the text mostly. and slightly on top of it. really weird

For me it looks like the image here, but images just about 2 mm apart, and usually the secondary image is so light that only stronger contrast edges are well visible. And the two images are seen with the same eye (the other eye closed).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplopia

I just put that here, because if the double images are close, it probably looks a lot like the blurr.

Sorta like that but yeah only 1 and a half to 2mm. if i look at the moon at night i see a slight ghostly double effect on the bottom and top. mostly the bottom.