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by Someone 2666 days ago
”moon at its brightest is about 0.5 lux”

Given the wonders of dark adaptation of the human eye (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptation_(eye)#Dark_adaptati...), does that really matter? In my experience, the full moon is almost bright enough to comfortably read normal black on white printed text.

1 comments

Many of the mechanisms for light impacting biological functions show a clear dose-response relationship - fewer photons hitting the retina leads to less effect.

As a rough estimate, one decade (10x) of the eye’s light adaptation, at most, comes from aperture variation - the pupil expanding and contracting. The rest comes from intensity-driven modification of the sensing and image processing systems in the eye - rods that are completely saturated with signal above a few dozen lux become the primary sensors in very low light.

In other words - just because the moon provides enough light to see and even read doesn’t mean that it will cause insomnia.