The cornea protects the rest of your eye and is therefore covered in pain receptors that alert you whenever a pesky eyelash is on the loose.īut UV radiation isn’t the only issue. Too much visible light can penetrate your eye and damage the retinal tissue, which causes a condition called solar retinitis. This means parts of your retina can no longer process light normally, so you can end up with entire chunks of your vision blurred out.ĭepending on the extent of the damage, recovery can take weeks, months, and in severe cases over a year. Now, you’re doing more than just overloading your retina. For starters, you’re giving your eyes an abnormally high dose of UV radiation the same stuff that causes sunburns. Like your skin, the cornea at the front of your eye can also burn. Usually, it clears up in a few minutes that is, unless you keep staring. Normally, light reaches the retina at the back of your eye, where it triggers photoreceptors that relay the information to your brain. This is how you are able to see anything.īut bombard them with too much light at once, and you can actually damage the cells and proteins that help them process light. Since your retina has no pain receptors, the damage won’t hurt, but it will leave that blurry splotch on your vision. If it’s only for a moment, the worst you’ll experience is a blurry splotch on your vision called an after image. On a clear day, the sun shines up to 5,000 times brighter than an average light bulb. When something that bright strikes your eye, a few things can happen. Now, looking at the sun through a telescope is an especially terrible idea but just how bad is it to glance up with the naked eye? Whether it’s to map the stars, spy on other planets, or study the sun, humans have been looking to the skies for millennia. But some objects are safer to observe than others.įor example, astronomer Mark Thompson put a pig’s eye behind a regular telescope aimed at the sun and it burned a hole straight through the lens in about 20 seconds. Subscribe to our channel and visit us at: įollowing is the transcript of the video: Tech Insider tells you all you need to know about tech: gadgets, how-to’s, gaming, science, digital culture, and more. But what about our eyes? What would happen if we happened to stare directly at the sun? We all know the harmful effects of the sun touching our skin, so we ready ourselves with sunscreen to block the rays.
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