> I’ve been in parts of the country where there’s complete blackness in the new moon. I didn’t stop to count the stars, but it looked much more like the second picture than the first one. The Milky Way is astonishingly vivid and the stars are endless.

I just got back from Exuma Island in the Bahamas. This is a decently remote island without much light pollution. It was by far the best star-gazing I've ever experienced. I've backpacked in Big Bend, Yosemite, and Yellowstone (and less notable areas), Exuma takes the cake for looking at the heavens.

I say all of this because the picture on the left seems much more representative of the _best star-gazing conditions I've ever witnessed_. The Milky Way was big and beautiful; It caused my S.O. and I to sit outside for 1.5 hours just staring. But it still looked more like the first picture.

Maybe you were mis-remembering, or maybe your vision is just better for these sorts of things. Either way, I want to know where you were to see the second picture.

The second photo more closely matches what I see, though it looks more black and white than that. I suspect there is a wide range of night vision as I have watched people stumble around when I thought there was plenty of light.

Are you by any chance color blind?

No, but at night color becomes difficult to distinguish. It's not exactly black and white but really muted colors.

That’s for everyone. Cones have lower sensitivity and more noise. Colorblind people have supposedly higher quantities of rods.

I've been out in the middle of the savannah in Kenya, with no artificial lights around, and it looked worse than the picture on the left. Night sky photography is best understood as a creative art form, with only the faintest connection to what the sky actually looks like to human eyes.