This sounds very similar to what astronomers experience when they look at the moon. One eye is exposed to a sunlit moonscape, the other is in relative darkness. When you turn away from the eyepiece, the eye that was just exposed to moonlight seems practically blind. The effect is especially strong when using large telescopes at relatively low magnification. It wears off, of course.
Late night smartphone use makes women go blind
Taking your smartphone to bed won’t just leave you tossing and turning, it can actually make you go temporarily blind, a team of London-based doctors have warned. A letter to the New England Journal of Medicine from a London-based team of researchers and medics details two cases of “transient monocular vision loss” the team …
COMMENTS
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Thursday 23rd June 2016 15:36 GMT Lamb0
So true. That's the reason I seldom observe with my 8" Newtonian when "Ol Sightblinder" is near full. A slender crescent is best to better detect tiny peaks and crisp craters.
An OLED display on a tablet or phone I can adjust to (what most people might call "ludicrously") faint levels would be nice. Few people have any accurate conception of true dark adaptation.
For deep sky observing, a monochromatic red mode too faint to perceive color without the necessity of red transparency layer(s) would be a boon for Sky Safari Pro. ;<)
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Thursday 23rd June 2016 10:33 GMT John H Woods
Deliberate differential dark adaption...
This is why pirates wore eye-patches and soldiers are trained to close/cover one eye when flares are deployed. It is also why I cover one eye when switching off the yard lights in winter. Looks ridiculous, but less ridiculous than stumbling blindly around the car-park. Also a handy technique on nocturnal dog walks where you know you are going to trigger somebody's 50 billion watt searchlight when you walk past their house.
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Thursday 23rd June 2016 10:56 GMT phuzz
Re: Haar!
V-bomber pilots were issued with eye patches for a similar reason, although it was expected that the detonation of a nuke nearby would make them more than just temporarily blind, but in theory they'd have a good eye to try and land with.
Although, as their missions would have involved bombing the Soviet Union at the same time as the US was nuking it with ICBMs, they'd probably see a lot of nuclear explosions in one day.
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Thursday 23rd June 2016 14:02 GMT Vinyl-Junkie
Re: Haar!
In this case I suspect land meant a good landing (one you can walk away from) as opposed to a great one (one where you can use the aircraft again afterward).* The V-Bombers were notoriously difficult to eject/bail out from so I suspect the preferred option would have been to put them down on something; even if it was wet!
*Definition courtesy of my PPL instructor.
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Thursday 23rd June 2016 16:15 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: Haar!
Interesting, as British bombers were only expected to have a one way journey with their airfield having been destroyed by the mutual destruction going the other way!
As I understand it, they planned their own missions - and they had a nice bunker to do it in, full of all the latest intel, maps of the Soviet Union etc. So all they were issued with was their targets.
Once they'd done that, they got to use whatever fuel they had left to plan their escape. It was rather unlikely that there'd be anything to come home to - and other than maybe those bombing Leningrad, not many of them would have had the fuel anyway. I get the impression from the odd interview I've seen and read that none of them took this part of the mission planning terribly seriously. I guess if you were near a neutral border, you could try to cross, land and hope for the best. On the other hand, as the rather obvious agents of the nuclear destruction of large parts of civilisation - you might not be terribly popular.
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Thursday 23rd June 2016 11:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
After getting approval from the appropriate ethics committee...
...a pair of the authors subjected themselves..
Did they really need permission from a ethics committee to do non-contagious tests on themselves?
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Thursday 23rd June 2016 12:31 GMT Mike Shepherd
"an understanding of retinal physiology...can avoid unnecessary anxiety..."
The same happens if you read a book. Doctors train for years to deal with serious problems, not these trivialities. Avoiding "unnecessary anxiety and costly investigations" doesn't need a caring session, just a smack on the face and instruction to "get real".
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Thursday 23rd June 2016 12:39 GMT Mike Green
I wrote in to New Scientist on this subject quite a few years ago
But I don't think I got an answer. I wondered if anyone new of any long term damage that might occur, and how much brighter screens would have to be to damage an eye. We know looking at the sun even for a few moments can permanently damage it, and a brother of a friend once went blind for 3 days after doing some welding without a mask (surprise) but I imagine it's hard to do qualitative studies because of the ethical problems involved in blinding people no matter how temporary.
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Thursday 23rd June 2016 15:19 GMT Tikimon
There's an app for that...
Probably several. I have one called Twilight that automatically dims and reddens the display at certain hours. You can set the amount of dimming and redshift and what times of course. It's designed to prevent sleep-impairment from bright light exposure, but I imagine it would help with the temporary blindness too.
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