It will? I’ve been an amateur astronomer for many years and I’ve never heard of that. And I’ve done my fair share of staring as well, and I’ve never seen that happening.

It’s like one of those optical illusions, where you stare at a point and then you begin to see other things. I think it has something to do with your focus, when looking closely at something your focus can shift. Because a star is relatively small (in your field of vision, that is) the blurring that can result is enough to keep you from seeing it.

No, it’s becaus of evolution. The way our eyes are wired we have a dark spot in the middle of our field of vision. We don’t usually see it because our eyes are always moving and reconstituting the complete image, but if you stare very hard at a small point, well it just commes right in the middle of the dark spo, and since we stop moving our eyes…