Pre-renaissance, medieval, roman, etc, did they know they shouldn’t look directly at the eclipse?
In: Planetary Science
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”.
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