Where I am the eclipse obscuration will be 0.993. There is also likely to be an orange/brown haze from nearby wildfires. Can I really not look at the Sun for just two seconds? There was a thread about this here several years ago, and a couple of people stated that the danger from looking at an eclipse is exaggerated, and that a brief glace is harmless. Is this true, or am I remembering wrong?
I think everyone here has done hundreds to thousands of brief glances at the sun in their life without damage (and sometimes more than brief–when you are driving west and the sun is setting ahead of you). But an eclipse is something you want to stare at for a while.
Part of it is that it is dim enough that you can force yourself to look at it for long enough to do damage.
Try (don’t) looking at the sun on a cloudless bright day at noon. You cannot, you will flinch away, your body simply will not let you do so. Please don’t try too hard at this (or really at all), it is possible to overcome this instinct, but not a good idea.
With 99.3% of the sun’s disc obscured, you can probably stand to look at it far longer. It’s not just the visible light that will hurt you, either.
It’s hard to say how much damage will be done and over what period of time, so best advice is just not to look at it.
Also, that 99.3% obscuring is the maximum, even if that is enough to protect your vision at that instant, it will be brighter both before and after.
Something about the iris not stopping down all the way to protect the retina when the sun is mostly blocked.
When it’s dark your pupils dilate, but harmful UV still reaches your eye.
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My idea was to set an alarm on my phone for exactly for 10:19:31, and then look at it for two seconds, counting “one one thousand, two one thousand” to myself, and then immediately look away. Still a bad plan?
Yes.
The uneclipsed sliver is just as bright as the full sun.
How will you know your phone is synchronized for exactly that time? Yes, your alarm will go off when your phone’s internal clock reaches that time, but it could be off by several seconds.
Another warning: don’t try to “block” the sun with a piece of paper or cardboard. The paper will block out another of the visible light that it will be possible to look at the eclipse. But it won’t block out the UV light. That will go right through the paper and wreck your eyesight.
Use eclipse glasses. Better still, go to somewhere inside the path of totality and get the full experience.
At .993 you will not see the corona, you will not see the Diamond Ring, you will not see Bailey’s Beads. You will see it get slightly dark.