Explain to my son that it’s safe for your eyes to play soccer during sunsets.

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My ten years old got into soccer recently and he’s getting good at it, except, he has this paranoia that he’ll get blind (or will have severe eye damage) if he traces the ball through the air against a sunny backdrop. Because of this he won’t practice in the evening and this is when most training happens.

We had an eclipse recently and I think he took the “don’t look at the sun” mantra way too far and I don’t know how to undo that.

Please help!!!

In: Physics

29 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Don’t look at the sun directly. That’s why the eclipse is hazardous, as people are looking at it directly. Staring straight at the sun is and always will be bad for your eyes but that’s just staring at it directly. Hell, even looking directly at it won’t make you to blind unless you can manage to look for so long it burns your eyes out, a small glimpse of the direct thing isn’t harmful and if it was everyone over 35 would be blind. If accidental glimpses of the whole sun could blind us we would have died out a long time ago, evolution gave us the ability to withstand seeing everything short of staring directly into the sun for extended periods of time.

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