Fact #154
Observing
Moonlight looks cold and silver-blue, and photographs of it come out warm. The blue is in the eye, not the light — lunar rock is slightly redder than the Sun.
In dim light the cone cells that see colour give up and the rods take over, and rods are most sensitive to blue-green. The effect is the Purkinje shift, and it is why cinema has faked night with a blue filter for a century. Point a camera at the same scene and you get the honest answer: warm grey.
Source: Purkinje shift; CIE scotopic luminosity function · checked Sep 2026