Also the reduced light means your eyes have less light to discriminate color with, resulting in ordinarily bright colors being muted or gray-ish.

Yeah, the severe color change was an interesting experience. I didn't bother trying to image it, as the fakey fakeness of the enhancing software would have "corrected" it.

Not only that, but the light source that's creating the shadow gets smaller (in terms of arc length), so the shadow becomes more crisp.

When it's a crescent shape, it's also more crisp in one direction. So if you hold up a square and make a shadow on the ground, two sides are sharp, two sides are blurry. Or if you look at your own shadow, it's a mix of sharp and blurry edges, which looks unusual.