Naked-eye stars
Naked eye, also called bare eye or unaided eye, is the practice of engaging in visual perception unaided by a magnifying or light-collecting optical device, such as a telescope or microscope. Vision corrected to normal acuity using corrective lenses is considered "naked". In astronomy, the naked eye may be used to observe events that can be viewed without equipment, such as an astronomical conjunction, the passage of a comet, or a meteor shower. Sky lore and various tests demonstrate an impressive wealth of phenomena that can be seen with the unaided eye.
The basic accuracies of the human eye are:
Visual perception allows a person to gain much information about their surroundings:
The visibility of astronomical objects is strongly affected by light pollution. Even a few hundred kilometers away from a metropolitan area where the sky can appear to be very dark, it is still the residual light pollution that sets the limit on the visibility of faint objects. For most people, these are likely to be the best observing conditions within their reach. Under such "typical" dark sky conditions, the naked eye can see stars with an apparent magnitude up to +6m. Under perfect dark sky conditions where all light pollution is absent, stars as faint as +8m might be visible.
The angular resolution of the naked eye is about 1′; however, some people have sharper vision than that. There is anecdotal evidence that people had seen the Galilean moons of Jupiter before telescopes were invented. Of similar magnitude, Uranus and Vesta had most probably been seen but could not be recognized as planets because they appear so faint even at maximum brightness that their motion could not be detected. Uranus, when discovered in 1781, was the first planet discovered using technology (a telescope) rather than being spotted by the naked eye.
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