A common example would be faint stars that can’t be seen unless you’re looking at a point a couple degrees away. But I just experienced this phenomenon with a random object under my kitchen sink when retrieving a dishwasher tablet in very low light.
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In your central vision, the fovea of the retina does not have any rods, only cones. Rods are the black and white seeing photo receptors where cones are the color receptors. Anything in very dim/dark ambient light is very difficult to perceive when looked at directly because of this
Faint objects are more visible when we’re moving our eyes (in “saccades”) across the visual landscape. So I wonder if the effect you noticed was not because of you looking slightly away but because of the resultant saccades.
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