You somehow magically sense something there through your eyes, but you don’t see it at all. It’s stronger if you don’t look at it directly and move your head about a little. It’s like there’s an unconscious observer reporting where things are, and you just take the info and acknowledge it, but you don’t see it. Anyone else get this?
Your peripheral vision works better than the center of your vision in low light, that’s why you can sort of see things in the edge of your field of view but not when you directly look at them
Above and beyond that, scientists say the rods of the eye are sensitive enough to detect individual photons.
I can’t confirm that myself, but it seems about right to me.
Yeah, we did a lab on this in college. Rods are sensitive enough to be triggered by <10 photons, cones take around 100x more to fire.