Whether looking at the sun will cause this type of injury depends on both how long you look without protection and the sun’s position in the sky. When intense solar radiation hits the retinas, it can damage and even destroy those cells, in what doctors call a retinal photochemical injury, or solar retinopathy.
Retinas contain two types of photoreceptors: rods that help you see in the dark and cones that produce color vision.
#How to see the eclipse without damaging eyes series#
Sunlight damages the eyes by triggering a series of chemical reactions in the retina, the light-sensitive part at the back of the eye. “I have seen instances where the patient has eventually shown up with crescents burned into the back of the eye, and you can almost tell exactly when they looked.” HOW EYEBALLS GET “SUNBURNED” That’s because the light from the sun is so intense that it can literally burn your eyeballs - even during a solar eclipse, when part of the sun’s disk is still visible.Įven the tiniest sliver of a crescent sun peeking out from behind the moon emits enough light to scorch your eyes, Ralph Chou, professor emeritus at the School of Optometry & Vision Science at the University of Waterloo in Canada, told. You’ve probably been told that it isn’t safe to stare at the sun and that watching a solar eclipse without proper eye protection can make you go blind.
But those who aren’t careful risk doing some nasty damage to their eyes. 21, millions of people will gaze at the sun to see the moon slowly pass in front of it, blocking out the light.
During the Great American Total Solar Eclipse on Aug.
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