Lately I have been doing some outdoor activities at dusk, and I am discovering that my night vision is not as good as my friends’. Is there anything I can do to improve it? I am already taking a multivitamin that has 200% of the rda of vitamin A in it, and I eat carrots fairly often anyway so I don’t think eating more of them will help.
Do you smoke cigarettes? Significantly impacts the night vision.
no, I don’t smoke
Night vision goggles.
Flashlight for your head. Camping stores like REI have them.
What are these activities you are doing at dusk and are the friends male or female?
Kal, my evidence is only anecdotal but when I was in the navy I found that if I wore sunglasses all the time my night vision was improved. I was working on an aircraft carrie flight deck at night so it was really important I could find my way around. I reached the point I was driving at night and going into clubs with them. People began to think I was obsessed with Ray Charles 
Apparently it is also a good idea to try to look out of the corners of your eyes, as this focuses the availiable light on the rods (or cones… I forget which), which are better able to deal with low light situations, for some reason.
Bilbery extract w/ standardized to contain 25% anthocyanosides at a dose of 250-500mg/day is what Atkins recommends in his vitanutrient book (p310).
Other then that bright light can take away night vision instantly and it may take a long time for you to recover - try not to look at any bright lights and stay out of bright enviroments before your activity.
Very close, but its not the corner of your eyes that is important, so much as the movement of your eyes… Heres something for you to try: Go outside when it’s dark, and have a look around. Try to find something to look at that’s reasonably defined (like a stack of firewood or something). Now stare at it from a reasonable distance (ie. not right next to it) without moving your eyes. What you will notice is that the longer and harder you stare, the less defined everthing becomes, and eventually it becomes a blob of shadow. I forget the technical details exactly, but IIRC your eyes behave like your muscles. If you hold a weight of some kind, your muscles begin to feel sore and eventually you will drop it. This is partly because acid builds up in your muscles. IIRC, your eyes behave much the same way, in that there’s a build up of purple (or something like that) and eventually it gets too dark…
So, the solution is that you must move your eyes. Rather than staring at your target directly, move your eyes constantly so that you are looking at the edges of it. You will be using peripheral vision mostly, BUT it will be a more defined, and it prevents the aforementioned buildup.
-Dani
The OP didn’t mention ages, so I will. As you age, your night vision becomes less and less sensitive. By age 40, you’ll need a full moon to see what you could see with just a quarter moon at 20. So if your friend is significantly younger than you, that could be a factor.
The suggestion about sunglasses is a good one - to protect your vision your eyes will tone down their light sensitivity if you’re in bright sunlight a lot. By wearing sunglasses, you can avoid that.
Vitamin A & relatives only work if you have vision problems resulting from a deficiency. Extra A won’t improve your vision.
After dark, you need to use off-center viewing. The focal point of your eyes is full of a type of cell called cones, which are responsive to color but don’t do well in dim light. The outer areas of your vision have cells called rods, which don’t see color but do work in dim light. After dark, your cones shut down from lack of input, which is why everything is less distinct - the best focal part of your eye isn’t working. You can, however, learn to view everything a little off-center (not in peripheral vision) with a little practice, and thereby get the maximum value from your night vision. It feels odd at first, but with time it becomes second-nature. It won’t make you see better, just make better use of what you see.
Actually, the location matters too. The very center of the field of view is filled with cones, but the area around it has more rods. I’d say maybe 10 degrees away. It’s a common technique in amateur (visual) astronomy - look directly at a faint nebula and you won’t see it, but if you you look at a point some angle from it, you’ll see it.
By the way, 10 degrees is about the width of your fist with your arm fully extended.
If it was the kind of nocturnal activity where the sex of the participants mattered, I wouldn’t need good vision now would I?
Not that I don’t enjoy doin’ it in the park in the dark…