Solar eclipse is just moon coming between sun and earth and its shadow getting cast on earth. Since the sun rays are getting blocked due to the moon, shouldn’t it actually be safer to view it directly as compared to normal sun?
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When the Sun emerges you go from low light conditions to very bright light and your pupils are wide open and let a lot of light into your eyes which can damage them.
It is better than the normal sun, but it’s still dangerously bright. Once totality is reached, it’s perfectly safe to view without glasses because all you see is the corona, which is so much duller by comparison, hence why you can’t see it under normal circumstances.
Being totally honest, during the eclipse in 2018, as totality neared, I would take glances without the glasses. It still hurts, but not nearly as much as the full sun. In order to look for any extended period of time you need the glasses. This also applies for an annular solar eclipse. That is a solar eclipse that would be a total eclipse, but the moon is too far from the Earth (or the Earth is too close to the sun) so the moon I entirely in front of the Sun, but the moon is too small is relative size to completely block out the sun.
I highly recommend seeing a total eclipse whenever you can, it’s absolutely beautiful.
Looking at an eclipse is safer than looking at the ordinary sun, but nobody spends two hours staring at the ordinary sun. We usually avoid looking at the sun due to instinct and pain response, but the eclipse gives us a reason to ignore those warnings.
>Since the sun rays are getting blocked due to the moon,
Not all of the Sun’s rays will be blocked. The Sun is a *very* intense light source, so even a small section showing around the moon is enough to damage your eyes.
Closing of the sum by moon isn’t dangerous to see.when you keep watching it at one point your eyes adjusts to low light thats is isn’t dangerous.when the sun comes out ,it is actually pretty fast how bright it becomes in matter of milli seconds and at that time your eyes can’t adjust that fast and it causes problems not immediately but after 20 years or so you will find a blindspot on the vision called solar retinopathy
Thank you everyone for taking the time to explain. I finally get it. Actually in my childhood and school years, at least as far as i remember, we were only warned against looking at the solar eclipse directly, viewing normal sun’s danger was seldom discussed.
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Somehow noone has mentioned a very important issue yet.
Your eyes accommodate to darkness by widening the pupil, allowing more of the sparse light to enter the eye. That why the first light when you wake up on a winter morning can be quite unbearable.
Same things happends during a solar eclipse, as light fades, the pupils dilate. When the sun re-emerges, it happends quite fast, faster than the pupils can contract, making your eyes way more vulnerable to damage from the sun that they’d otherwise be.
If you stare at a normal sun, you burn a little round hole on your retina. If you stare at a nearly-eclipsed sun, you burn a pretty little crescent shape on your retina. And as others have pointed out, your iris is likely more open, so you’ll burn it quicker.
Everyome here is missing the actual reason (unless someone has said this and i havent seen it). When you look at the sun, you go “ow oof ouch thats bright better look away”, but when there is an eclipse, the bright light that would make you look away is gone, but the DAMAGING ultraviolet rays are still there, except there is now no longer any bright light to encourage you to squint or look away. You are burning off the cells in your retina without even knowing. The only time it is completely safe to look is during the peak, when the entirety of the sun is blocked out, including the UV rays.
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