RE this
Watch The Navy’s First Operational Laser Cannon Blow Crap Up
I realize sunglasses are not going to protect you from a military death laser but for the lower powered green lasers that can damage your retinas and pop balloons etc what is the best eye protection? Are darker sunglasses better or worse? Would mirrored sunglasses be best? Polarized? Lens color?
I think you would need something that more resembles a welding mask than sunglasses.
You want a filter which absorbs the frequency of the laser light.
So, for a green laser, you want a red filter. Tuning it for the particular frequency helps.
I have some laser safety glasses which are perfectly clear, but they are designed to absorb IR light.
You can get eye protection for specific lasers that attenuates just the specific wavelengths associated with that laser; this lets you see room light just fine so you can do your work, but prevents the laser from smoking your eyeballs. Depending on what you’re doing, you may want total attenuation or just partial attenuation; the latter is relevant if you need to see the beam’s impact points on targets.
If you’re dealing with a laser that can pop balloons, sunglasses are likely to be a very poor substitute for laser glasses/goggles. The darkest of sunglasses still let in a few percent of incident light. Some math here suggests that a 1-mW HeNe laser can result in retinal irradiance 167X that of the sun. You can now get 2000-mW handheld laser pointers; in other words, it may be possible to get retinal irradiance 334,000 times as great as the sun. Put on sunglasses with 3% transmittance, and you’re still blasting your retina with 10,000 times the intensity of the sun.