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After an average of around fifteen minutes in the dark your eyes will adjust and you'll be able to see pretty well under starlight or a moon. You can do pretty darn well if you're practiced and used to it. Use of flashlights will effectively 'reset' and ruin it though, so YMMV.
I've never seen anything that can be considered "affordable" that I wouldn't consider a disadvantage to hobbling around and yelling at people to turn their flashlights off.
NV is a serious sub-hobby in and of itself more or less, these guys aren't trying to rain on your cake, just trying to save you money.
Anecdote: A buddy of mine got a real good deal on a couple 'nicer' civilian Gen1+ scopes once (still not 'affordable'). They ruled if you wanted to try and find pieces of constellations and figure out which ones they were while otherwise blindfolded (it was a good drinking game).
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