I have the anti-reflective coating with Scotch Guard coating. I thought the Scotch Guard was a scam that would do nothing, but I thought what the hell. Then I had to get a lense replaced and they put in temporary pair that had anti-reflective lenses, but without the Scotch Guard and I could not keep them clean. You might want to look into this. I think it is only available at Lenscrafters, but I think most places have something similiar.
I have the problem described in the OP. It’s worse in my left eye, which has much more astigmatism than the right eye does. Maybe that’s what causes that problem?
My bet is the stars you see are because of higher-order shape errors in your corneas or higher-order nonuniformity within the parts of your eye. So, if you’re too curved you’re nearsighted, but if you’re curved to different degrees depending on what orientation you measure then you have astigmatism. If you are lumpy in a more complex way than that, you have higher-order errors. Like glass that is ripply.
I think contacts can fix errors like this if they occur at the front of the cornea.
One hint would be if you look through a pinhole and see the stars go away. By “pinhole” I really mean a clean crisp hole that is smaller than your pupil, such as 1/4 the size or so.
I don’t know, this only came about in the last year at most. The reason I went for new ones was mainly just because the old ones were having this problem at night. I figured they were just scratched, but maybe they were “crazed” as mentioned above. My Rx didn’t change much. Really, it was a year or less since I started seeing this with the old ones, so it seems odd that I would suddenly have wavy corneas. Does that happen?
About pinholes, should I do that with or without the glasses on?
I forgot to mention, I also get some double images. When there’s a street sign, something with a sharp edge, I get a few shifted, faint images of it to the sides and sometimes shifted vertically a bit I think. I should mention, yes I have driven around with my head out the window to make sure it isn’t just the windshield.
My astigmatism did increase, to something like 1 diopter I believe; I don’t know if it was negative or positive.
One thing they don’t tell you about is that the type of nose piece on your frame will affect your vision. Lenses are measured with those big machines holding lenses a certain distance from the eye. I think this is the same distance as the nose pieces with little pads on wires. If the nose piece is integrated and just part of the frame, like on plastic sunglasses, then the lenses sit closer to the eye. This changes the peripheral vision, which is to say all but the very center line of view. It’s quite troublesome for people with bifocals because it changes the proportion of closeup to distance viewing. But it’s not on the prescription so the doctor doesn’t control it.
When they give me new glasses they always say “So, can you see better?” and just expect you to look around the room and leave. I always say it’s hard to tell without the chart and ask to see one, to actually test what’s the smallest line I can read. They hate this, but I act like they owe it to me and they always give in.
I don’t know how quickly corneas can get more ripply. I’d think that the busiest ripples would take the most time to form.
Scratches generally scatter light in a direction perpendicular to the scratch. If you have scratches in just two or three directions you can get light scattering pointing in specific directions (secondary mirror mounts in telescopes, and straight edges in camera iris leaves, can also do this, which may explain why we refer to the shapes as “stars” in the first place - all stars but the sun are amazingly small and perfect points of light in a purely geometrical sense).
If you can rotate your glasses around your line of sight and make the points of the stars rotate, they must be from scratches - but if you have astigmatic glasses you will also dial astigmatic blur in and out while you do this, unfortunately.
About pinholes, you should do it with the glasses on, or substitute other glasses that are close in prescription but have fewer scratches. Pinholes also make you less sensitive to the prescription, and a small enough pinhole will look equally clear with and without your glasses. If you can get a pinhole small enough to make things look pretty sharp, you can take your glasses away to see if the stars lose their points, more evidence that it’s scratches causing them.
Double images, of the sort that look like fainter and fainter echos off to one side, probably are from the reflections at the two surfaces of your glasses. How severe they are would be a strong indicator of how good your antireflection coatings are.
Another thought - if you know your prescription in diopters, and you divide 1000 by that number, you need a lens with that focal length in millimeters to cancel out your problem. If you are nearsighted you need that lens to be planoconcave or concave-concave. You could order such a lens from someplace like Edmund Scientific (or one of the dozen or so little places Edmund seems to have morphed into). It’d be glass, and maybe be an achromat so there’s less chromatic abberation, and in any case it would have far fewer scratches than a typical pair of plastic lenses we wear. You could use it as a sort of a gold standard.
With 5 diopters of miopia and 1 diopter of astigmatism, you might find the star points improved, or might not, I’m not sure.
Ugh, THANK YOU! My current pair of glasses has been driving me nuts on this score. Ask my husband how much I bitch about never getting my glasses clean. Sometimes I will clean them, they look clean, then I sit down to watch TV, and my vision is messed up. I look at the glasses and find there’s a greasy smear, visible only when I tilt them a certain way. No matter what I do, they never really come totally clean. The best I can do is reduce the smeary areas and move them to the edges of the lenses. I really wondered if I was just too picky and mental about it.
I just got new glasses, which I swear they scratched tyring to de-crookify them. I’m going back, and asking for new, non-nonreflective lenses.
Anyway, as to the OP, my current glasses don’t seem to have much distortion, even toward the edges. However, I remember one time when they got the focal point misplaced on a new pair, and it was like navigating the world through a funhouse mirror.