Shorttail wrote:
Pretty sure it's the eye's own color correction. Like if you keep one eye closed for a while in bright sunlight, one eye will see more blue and the other more orange. Somewhere in the eye or brain the data is probably lost or ignored if it persists.
Not sure about the merging. I notice it when looking at weak stars, they tend to disappear when looked directly at.
I think you're right- the eye and brain color-correction system gets strained when you stare at something. Shut your eyes and you see a flash of the complimentary color of the thing you just starred at ( if its the blue sky you see orange). So if you keep your eyes open a long time your brain or eye might flash anyway- and you see the complimentary color superimposed on the object itsself-which would result in you seeing alot of gray.
The reason small stars disappear is because your eye has a blind spot where the optic nerve enters the eye. The wireing to transmit the data from your eye requires a small spot in your eye has to be free of receptor cells.
Sailors ,in the pre GPS days of sail, had to look intently at stars to navigate and knew to look slightly away from a star to see it. Sailor-turned novelist Joseph Conrad wrote about how you had to look away from a star slightly in order to see the star to navigate by it. Further- the star itsself my be light years away and may have exploded centuries ago and not even exist anymore. So you have to look where the star isnt, in order to see the star, which isnt there, in order to navigate- that was his metaphor for the the position of man in the universe.
22 Jun 2012, 11:16 pm
