realflow100 wrote: ↑Fri Jun 11, 2021 8:25 am
Its not possible to be fully dark adapted. Even just the bare sky itself is bright enough that it hurts my dark adaptation alone (Compared to being in a very dark room with the blinds closed. the room brigter right after i wake up in the moddle of the night and look outside my bedroom window while crouching down to block off any streetlight glare for just a couple minutes i close the blinds again and the room looks much darker and hard to see anything in my room. so even just looking at the sky itself is hurting dark adaptation at that point. i see less and less things
Ive tried an svbony UHC filter and it just didnt do anything. Made the background sky significantly darker. but did not make any nebulus details pop out any more. Didn't help but didn't hurt either. no difference.
More than like 5 minutes of dark adaptation does nothing for me. i just wont see any more than after about 5 minutes.
I can walk outside in the middle of the night right after waking up from sleeping (maximum potential dark adaptation.) and the sky seems bright and gray. and then slowly gets darker over a minute or two until its only as bright as if i let my eyes adapt for 5 minutes. even though I was asleep and my eyes were adapting for hours and hours. (Didn't turn any lights on in the house either on my way out)
and nothing is any easier to spot either. I dont see any more stars even. Same amount of stars as before. No deep sky objects visible in the night sky where I live naked eye. pleiades is the only one. and its set right now.
My eyesight is also about 20/40 to 20/50 because of quite strong astigmatism so stars are blurry and extra hard to see. very very very faint. I probably see 2 or maybe even 3 magnitudes less stars than someone with perfect eyesight would see.
I can only see stars as faint as about magnitude 3 approximately naked eye no matter WHAT I do.
Im getting glasses so I will hopefully have close to perfect eyesight. maybe i will be able to see more stars then.
There is a lot to unpack in your post:
1) You are describing severe light pollution (
Bortle Class 9), which is like my environment here in Los Angeles. When we have haze in the air, 2nd magnitude Polaris becomes hard to see.
However, you will still dark adapt more over a 30-45 minute trip outdoors. You can block local lights with screens, and even under a very bright sky, you will dark adapt somewhat--not to the maximum, but enough to enable you to see more in the scope.
For what it's worth, the brightness of the night sky affects maximum dark adaptation even at pristine sites with zero light pollution.
2) The Svbony UHC filter is more of a broadband filter than a true narrowband UHC filter. Broadbands are too gentle for light polluted environments. You need a true narrowband for nebulae, like those from Astronomik, TeleVue, DGM and Lumicon. You will see an effect there.
I did a scope demonstration once in downtown LA where only 5 stars were visible in Orion, yet the Orion Nebula stood out in the eyepiece with a Lumicon UHC filter.
3)Yes, you should use glasses to look at the stars. If your glasses correct your vision, stars will be tiny points. I pick up over a half magnitude when I wear my glasses to look at the night sky compared to no glasses, and I have fairly mild astigmatism.
4) One trick I learned from reading a book written in the 19th century, when ALL observers were visual was that if you want to see deeper in your scope, find the object in the scope and then stare at the ground for a while (1-5 minutes) and then through the eyepiece without looking at the sky in between. You will see a lot deeper than if you stare at the sky in between.
5) One other trick for star clusters and anything stellar is to bump the magnification up. Stars don't get dimmer as you increase magnification, but the background sky in the eyepiece does.
The sky in the eyepiece is 75% dimmer at 100x than it is at 50x, and when it comes to seeing fainter stars in the eyepiece, the improved contrast helps immensely. I get a good look at M11 in my 4" refractor here in LA at 143-179x, but I can barely see it at all at 50x.
So try bumping up the magnification when looking at open clusters or globular clusters.
And if you get an opportunity to go to darker skies with some friends, do it. I grew up without a car, but I had friends that liked to get away to darker sites and I would tag along. I would show them some sights in the sky and we would sit in chairs and talk almost all night long.