Why is looking at the sun during a solar eclipse worse than looking at the sun on a normal day?
In: Physics
The suns ability to damage your eyes is not usefully diminished by a total solar eclipse. While it doesn’t look bright enough to hurt your eyes, there’s still too much light and solar radiation by multiple levels for your eyes.
However, because the moon is blocking a lot of the light, it feels comfortable to look at. This means that you do not feel or see anything too bright from your perspective.
Which means that even though it feels fine, there’s still way too much damaging light getting in. Normally the sun is so bright that you’re naturally averse to looking at it. An eclipse is special because you don’t *feel* anything happening, but it’s still happening.
Imagine that you had a poison that tasted like cherries. It’ll kill you if you drink even a little of it, but normally you don’t because you can smell and taste the cherry flavor. Except you install a water filter and it filters out most of the poison but not all of it. Now you can’t taste it, but it’s still poisonous. It might take slightly more water to kill you, but it’s still there and horribly dangerous.
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