iliketrees wrote:
It's not blinding.
Is the regular moon blinding?
My apologies, I was using "blindingly" non-literally, as a figure of speech. Although, once night vision has been achieved, looking at the full moon can certainly bring about a large reduction in the ability to see compared to full dark adaptation.
The scale runs backwards, big negative numbers are super bright & big positive values are super dim. And it's not linear.
During the brightest full moons, the Moon can have an apparent magnitude of about −12.6
By comparison, the Sun has an apparent magnitude of −26.8
Vega, the fourth brightest star in our sky (including Sol) has an apparent magnitude of 0.0
6.5 to 7.0 is the limit of what we can see with our naked eyes at full darkness adaptation ("night vision"); anything with a larger positive number is too dim and additional light gathering optics are needed.
So, if your eyes are adapted to see objects of an apparent magnitude of 6.5 and you look directly at the full moon, they'll quickly adapt to -12.6. Once the afterimages fade, it'll still be another 10-20 minutes before you can see any but the very brightest stars. Under those conditions and given the reason one might be outside, it can be considered "blinding" in a loose sense of the word.
_________________
“For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”
―Carl Sagan