Seemingly every article I read advises everyone to wear eye protection, implying they should do so even during totality. Nooo! You will totally miss the corona! You may as well not even bother.
I assume most of those traveling long distances will know better; but this eclipse cuts a very unusual swath coast to coast, and residents along the way will have their experience ruined by this bullshit. Just as bad, they may tell others not to bother traveling or taking off work for the other eclipses coming in the next few years. “Don’t waste your time, I was excited but it was a total letdown.” Uggghhh.
All because the media don’t trust their readers to understand a slightly more complicated safety warning. :mad:
They have to dumb it down like that. Give too many details or facts, and the average idiot won’t understand it. Then they’ll sue YOU because THEY were too stupid to live.
More importantly (to the media outlets), what about the many lawsuits against media outlets for allegedly misleading the many people who are too dumb to understand instructions more complicated than “put on your eye protection and leave it on.”?
Seriously. Media can’t risk that level of liability. Dumb people can sue, too, and do so with disheartening regularity. Too dumb to protect their eyes, not too dumb to play the litigation lotto.
I was in Reading, PA for the March 1970 eclipse and made a pinhole viewer. I went out at the start of the eclipse and no one else was in our apartment complex’s parking lot. Not too surprising since there’s not a lot to see, yet.
I want back out 45 minutes later where there was a pretty big bite out of the sun. The sky was quite a bit darker, and still no one.
I went out again at maximum, about 96%, and the sky was really dark, the birds had stopped singing, etc. Still not a soul. Either the others in the complex were a really incurious bunch (entirely possible in Berks county) or they’d gotten the impression the actinic rays of an eclipsed sun would strike you down even if you didn’t look at it.
Well, they were trying to burn me to death on the day of the last eclipse, and I told them to let me go or I would blot out the sun, and it totally worked.
Can you cite or quote one or more of these warnings? Everything I have seen has said that the protective gear is not needed during the complete eclipse. Given the millions of people who will be able to only see the partial eclipse, some warnings would appear to be appropriate.
As to wearing the glasses during the complete eclipse, they will still be able to see the corona (if somewhat marred) and I suspect that when the complete eclipse occurs, they will take off the glasses just to keep from falling on their faces. (To say nothing of the fact that most of them will be surrounded by crowds that will include people who can explain why they do not need protection for the one and a half to two and a half minutes of the full eclipse.)
I wonder if people would trust someone in a crowd telling them “it’s fine” vs. the impression they had from seemingly authoritative media sources.
The proximate cause of my spleen-venting was Vox:
But it is definitely not the first time I’ve seen articles take this approach. Which of course is technically correct (due to the use of “day”) but misleading.
It’s a bad thing for the millions who will be in the path and will miss out! Here in Missouri where I live, we have a huge share of that group. But here’s another frustration: the schools in my town, including a prominent state university, are holding classes that day. The university is sponsoring eclipse activities, but they are all here in town, where it will be a 98% partial eclipse! Lame.
They should have waited a day or two, as so many students come from three metro areaa that will have totality in at least part of the metro: St. Louis, Columbia, and Kansas City. Or they could pile interested students into buses and drive an hour south. I talked about this to the guy organizing the activities, and his response was “98% is close enough for me”, as though there is only a slight quantitative difference and not a fundamental qualitative one. Idiot.
