That's backwards. Cyan at 500nm will bleach your rhodopsin FASTER than any other wavelength.
Red at longer than 640nm will not beach rhodopsin at all. However, the consequence of this is that you require a lot more of it to actually see with, and your peripheral vision doesn't work well with it. If you actually have to say read a map in the dark and don't want t lose your night vision, red is your only choice, as any other color bright enough to actually read with, will bleach your rhodopsin.
If you want to see where you are walking in the dark, IMO a better choice is a VERY dim white light source. The goal in this case is not lots of lumens, but to emulate the lighting levels of say a half-moon, where you can actually use your night vision, but not at a level that's so bright you bleach away your night vision faster than it can be replaced.
IMO the ideal there is very dim neutral white light source (eg, 3600-4200k color temp) -- like the actual moon. A light running 0.2 lumen is sufficient for lighting up a large walkway outdoors in a truly dark environment (ask me how I know).
Right and wrong:
Retaining Night Vision
To retain your night vision, a red light has been the traditional choice since before WWII when
the military settled on red as the best choice. Recently, there has been a move to green and
blue-green light, precipitated in large part by the military's change to green, which itself has been primarily motivated by the increased use of night vision equipment. Which is really better? As it turns out, green light offers some advantages over red as a means to retain night vision capability. However, it isn't cut and dried.
Total brightness, or illumination level, of the light has a potentially more significant effect on night vision retention than does the choice of red or green. Because your eyes are more receptive to green light, we gain better visual acuity at lower light levels than when using red light. Green also allows for differentiation between colors that red does not and the magenta used on aviation charts, for example, is readily readable under green light, not always the case with red.
Both reasons contribute to the fact that pilots and many others generally seem to prefer green
over red, it simply makes it easier to see and read in the dark cockpit. The potential problem is with the actual illumination levels we use, not the color of the light. The brighter the light, the more negative impact on night vision, both in our capacity to see and in how long it takes to gain back optimum night vision. This is true regardless of whether it is red or green.
Ideally, you want to use only as bright a light, red or green, as is necessary to perform your chores and no more. However, if you have a brighter light than you actually need,
a brighter green light will generally have a more negative effect than an equally bright red light. Green or
blue-green has a greater capacity to adversely affect night vision because the eyes are about 100 times more sensitive to these colors, so even moderately too bight light can have a serious deleterious effect.
Another complication is that an individual's visual acuity at low light levels varies quite a bit, so what would be perfect for one, might be too bright or too dim for another. In other words, without some means to vary intensity, odds are no light will be perfect. Bottom line is that red or green will both perform adequately, but what you really should be more concerned about is to avoid very high illumination levels, of either color, if retaining night vision acuity is your goal.
http://www.kriana.com/pages/nightvision.html
