What the Dark Actually Costs You: A Night Sky Photographer's Honest Field Notes
The first time I drove out to Steens Mountain at midnight, I pulled over on a dirt road about forty miles from the nearest town, cut the engine, and just sat there. Not because I was being poetic about it. My eyes needed time. That’s the thing most articles skip: your vision takes a full twenty to thirty minutes to reach its peak dark adaptation, and if you so much as glance at your phone screen without a red filter on it, you reset the clock.