Priming the opsins in your retina is a continuous process, and primed opsins are depleted rapidly by light. Fully adapting your eye to darkness takes a great deal of darkness and a great deal of time - on the order of an hour should set you up.
Most human beings in arctic regions live in places and engage in lifestyles where it's impossible to even come close to attaining the full light sensitivity of the human retina in perfect darkness. The sky never gets dark enough in a city or even a small town to get the full experience, and if you saw your smart watch five minutes ago you still haven't fully recovered your night vision. Even a sliver of moon makes remote dark-sky-sites dramatically brighter.
Everybody is going to have different degrees of the experience because they'll have eyes with different degrees of dark adaptation. And their brains are going to shift around the ~10^3x dynamic range of the eye up or down the light intensity scale by a factor ~10^6, without making it obvious to them.
But what sort of eyes are those?
Priming the opsins in your retina is a continuous process, and primed opsins are depleted rapidly by light. Fully adapting your eye to darkness takes a great deal of darkness and a great deal of time - on the order of an hour should set you up.
Most human beings in arctic regions live in places and engage in lifestyles where it's impossible to even come close to attaining the full light sensitivity of the human retina in perfect darkness. The sky never gets dark enough in a city or even a small town to get the full experience, and if you saw your smart watch five minutes ago you still haven't fully recovered your night vision. Even a sliver of moon makes remote dark-sky-sites dramatically brighter.
Everybody is going to have different degrees of the experience because they'll have eyes with different degrees of dark adaptation. And their brains are going to shift around the ~10^3x dynamic range of the eye up or down the light intensity scale by a factor ~10^6, without making it obvious to them.