Actually I suggested long ago that all visibility mods or mods that shipped tweaks to the environment shipped a sample screenshot for calibrating the monitor. Otherwise you can't know for sure that you are seeing what the modder saw when he balanced his creation. Too many times I have seen people yell against such a mod before actually realizing that they had inapropiate monitor settings to run it.
I personally do a series of calibration runs by setting all parameters to darker and waiting till my crew spots a ship in a sample mission I have. They I point at that bearing and rise the light until I can barely see the ship, and now I know that I see the same as my crew
And yes, identifying well a ship in a dark night is a pain. Herbert Werner in Iron Coffins told that when doing surface attacks at night they just aimed at the barely visible shadows, so go figure how difficult getting details would be.