Cool thing I learned recently: the flux from a magnitude-zero star is about a million photons per square centimeter per second.
Holy SHIT, now I found a paper demonstrating that humans can detect single individual photons shot into our eyes.
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12172
That's beyond ridiculous.
... I went on a date with my girlfriend and got distracted posting calculations about star luminosity online.
That's pretty Me.
@starkatt Felthry's the same way. I probably am too. There's something comforting about hearing that you are as well.
@starkatt I learned a nee word from this, "psychophysics", and it's a whole fascinating branch of things. Unsurprisingly coined by a German scientist. :-)
If I did the math right, that means from a star that's near the limit of human perception under ideal conditions, your eye is taking in ~650 photons per second when fully dilated.