How do you even look long enough to damage your eyes? I used a projector box and did like a 1/10th second glance with by bare eyes just to get a sense of it and even that was very uncomfortable, and left an afterimage for about 5 minutes.
I don’t doubt that people can be very dumb, but I’m surprised at the dedication people put into ruining their eyes.
I dunno man, I’ve got a coworker that swears looking at the sun is healthy “because that’s how you get vitamin D”… Says he looks directly at the sun every day. I have no idea how he doesn’t have vision problems, I just mostly assume he’s lying.
He’s probably just blind in the very center of his vision and doesn’t realize it, because he sees the brightness around the blind spot, and the brain is pretty good at ‘filling in’ missing information.
I saw a video a while ago about a helicopter EMT pilot who got hit with a laser while flying, and he’s blind right in the center of his vision. He doesn’t notice it most days, but he’ll catch himself looking ‘around’ things he’s focusing on to actually see them.
Your colleague probably doesn’t look long enough that he feels the ache/burn of the UV rays, or if he does, he assumes it’s something mystical, like the eyes producing vitamin D.
Boy is he gonna be surprised when he no longer can see the sun.
Unless he was pulling your leg. That’s always an option.
Being outdoors during daylight does reduce myopia compared to being in indoor lighting.
This doesn’t mean stare at the sun though. It means be in high brightness areas.
I believe that’s one of those “doctors say it’s bad for you, so it must actually be good for you” conspiracy theories. Kinda like antivax, but opposite “logic”, I guess.
Edit: https://www.allaboutvision.com/eye-care/eye-health/sun-gazing/
Little visible light dilates pupil. But there’s still plenty of UV that burns the receptors. The back of your eye doesn’t have melanin like your skin to absorb it or relevant pain recptors to notice the damage.
It takes a second to ruin your eyes in some way, but some people apparently don’t feel pain and can somehow do it for several seconds. There’s actually a report of a woman back in 2016 who looked at the sun for 6 seconds and later had blurry vision and a black spot in her vision.
I’d like to also see the search volume for the week prior for comparison.
I chuckled at the thought that there’s just this one county in Montana where people haven’t figured out that staring at the sun is bad.
Apparently an area shared by Florida and Alabama, too.
The more north you go in Florida, the more Southern is becomes. Right there, where Alabama can’t go more south and Florida can’t go more north? That’s prime sister-wife country.
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Does staring at the sun actually make your eyes hurt? In other words, does it cause pain in the eyes that persists after you look away? I know it can damage your vision but that’s different.
Your eyes can be damaged and you not feel it till later on
I think this guy on Mastodon was first https://mstdn.social/@kfury/112237755580600016
That is very pretty
Republican eyes
Looking at the totality doesn’t hurt people, though, and the partial eclipse was visible to the majority of North America.
