Tune-up your eyes for optimal nighttime viewing!

I normally wear glasses purely for close-up work and optical testing, but just recently I found that the slight astigmatism in my eyes was getting annoying enough to need spectacles for distant work too. This set me thinking about an article my old Sky & Telescope colleague, Joshua Roth, wrote in the September 2005 issue. Entitled 'Spectacles for Spectacular Skies', the article explains why your optician's prescription for distant viewing may not be optimal for stargazing. I discovered that I suffer from night myopia - a tendency to become a bit near-sighted in the dark. To cut a long story short, I had a pair of anti-reflection-treated glasses made up for me by an online store with lenses that were 0.5 dioptre weaker than my daytime distant prescription. The result: spectacularly sharp nighttime views!