Pre-renaissance, medieval, roman, etc, did they know they shouldn’t look directly at the eclipse?
In: Planetary Science
That’s pretty hard to answer as visual impairment with age would have been pretty commonplace and just expected. So if ancient people did suffer from eye damage due to looking at an eclipse, it probably wouldn’t show up in sources, as people’s vision was just expected to get worse with age.
It’s pretty hard to look straight at an eclipse until it’s >95% covered. You can also see the crescent shape on the ground as the sunlight passes through leaves.
Quick glimpses won’t blind you but you can damage the retinas leaving a burned in image like when a flash bulb goes off. In time, that damage can resolve if not too bad.
Smoked glass was used by early astronomers to get views of the sun.
I remember using pinhole cameras in grade school. Basically a hole the light shined through onto the bottom of a box.
Pinhole/camera obscura would have been the method for anyone who knew that. otherwise, looking at it for short periods of time would have been considered safe enough at the time.
You could also prepare a glass with a thin layer of lampblack to view through but glass was rare at one point as well.
People also would view it through the reflections in standing water etc. not perfect but safer. (do not recommend)
Because in reality it’s perfectly possible and easy to look carefully in the direction of a strong light source if you just squint and blink a bit. You’re not going to go blind the first time you look.
I actually did some research on this recently. The effects were known even in ancient Greece, but obviously they didn’t understand the actual damage that happened. Socrates warned about this in his writing, and suggested taking precaution by observing the sun by looking at its reflection in water (this is still dangerous, don’t take his advice).
I have also read that even people like Galileo or Newton encountered visual disturbances because they would look at the sun through a telescope.
How they protected their eyesight, I do not know, and did not come across any records (it wasn’t what I was focusing on).
Modern medicine seems to have first investigated the connection following a series of similar visual disturbances occurring in a group of naval recruits in the 1940s. These initial reports called it “foveomacular retinitis”, which describes the anatomical location and the problem, but not the cause. Different causes were hypothesised, but eventually, a connection was made to sun gazing, and they called this “solar retinopathy”. We now know that this can be caused by any light source if exposed long enough, and thus, the term is “photic retinopathy”.
Stop believing everything you read on the internet. You can have a 0.5 second glance and nothing bad will happen. Unless you just came out of eye surgery or something. People mocked trump a few years ago for doing this but if you use common sense you know you can’t go blind for looking at it 1 second.
You never looked directly at the sun as a kid? It’s not gonna hurt you if you don’t stare it at for an extended period of time.
Tsunami’s weren’t all that frequent, but I imagine mass death caused by one would quickly become part of the cultural identity. In much the same way, I’d expect mass blindness to enter into the cultural memory. This, in turn, would lead to quick glances, smoked glass usage or pinhole images. People in the past had the same intelligence as today and while they may not have understood the exact science, they certainly understood cause and effect.
During a total eclipse, you are supposed to remove your glasses during totality to see the good stuff.
It’s only the partial part that’s the issue.
So it was perfectly possible to watch the full eclipse in ancient time
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