The extreme lighting conditions on the Moon present significant challenges to the astronaut visual system. This study uses virtual reality (VR) technology to build a high-fidelity lunar lighting model and combines eye-tracking technology to explore visual adaptation mechanisms under dynamic lighting conditions. Thirty healthy participants completed geometric shape recognition tasks under four different lighting change speeds (1/5/10/15 s), resulting in 480 valid trials, which provided data on behavioral performance, eye movement characteristics, and subjective perception. The results indicate that rapid lighting changes increase astronauts’ visual load, leading to reduced recognition efficiency and accuracy, requiring more time to perceive the environment. In contrast, slower lighting changes alleviate visual load, improving information recognition accuracy and response speed. The slower the lighting change speed, the better the performance in information recognition tasks. Thus, slow lighting changes can help astronauts process information and execute tasks more effectively. This paper provides insights for human-computer interaction design and astronaut task settings in lunar environments.