The question is not what you can see best with the least energy, but what kind of glare in your peripheral vision will cause bright-adaptation. Your page there

The question is not what you can see best with the least energy, but what kind of glare in your peripheral vision will cause bright-adaptation. Your page there seems to be based on its author looking at the sentitivity curves for rods and cones and then speculating, but not as far as I can tell based on experimental evidence about how well the eyes stay dark-adapted. Edit: Moreover, the type of lamps appropriate for medium-bright street lighting and the type of lamps appropriate for briefly turning on to dimly see your camera gear while you fiddle with it when you are out taking night-sky photographs are quite different. Disclaimer: I am not an expert on triggers for brightness adaptation. I should try to hunt up some research papers sometime.) Looks like https://www.osapublishing.org/josa/abstract.cfm?uri=josa-41-6-402 https://www.osapublishing.org/josa/abstract.cfm?uri=josa-41-... is a reasonable place to start looking into the citation graph. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=4424978361272323417 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=4424978361272323417 Or maybe https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042698977800011 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004269897... https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=14694116360901580947 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1469411636090158094...