Is the Sun Heating Your Eye? The Space Agency Describes a Solar Eclipse as an Unintentional ‘Head of the Eye’
In reality, a solar eclipse brings a temporary sharp drop in solar radiation — an event that ham radio operators have been eagerly anticipating for months, with competitions and experiments looking to fill the Earth’s suddenly radiation-free ionosphere with radio signals.
If you’re using a special filter to look at the sun before or after totality, take breaks. The space agency says the sun’s heat can make you uncomfortable, as it warms the eye.
It seems like a notion that is concerned with radiation. NASA explained that the neutrino particles produced by the sun’s nuclear fusion were examples of “you’re already soaking in it.”
If the sun is above or below the horizon your body is being bombarded with trillions of these neutrinos every second. The only consequence is that every few minutes a few atoms in your body are transmuted into a different isotope by absorbing a neutrino. This is an entirely harmless effect and would not harm you, or if you are pregnant, the developing fetus.”
NASA gives a hypothetical: The eclipse might make people sick with bad potato salad. Food poisoning is very common and shouldn’t be blamed on a rare event, the agency notes.
The myths about the moon turning black during a eclipse or the Earth’s two poles not seeing eclipses are all false, according to the agency.
The Loss of the Sun During a Total Solar Eclipse: A Tale of Two Snakes, One for One, and Two for Two
People in totality can expect to feel a sudden drop in temperature, for instance. Stars and planets become visible in the middle of the day, and humans can experience a range of odd visual effects — from the sharpness of shadows to the movement of “shadow bands” and a change in how we perceive color.
For the OjibWE and other Indigenous peoples, a story about a solar eclipse focuses on a boy and his sister who attempt to catch the sun after it burns them.
In many folktales, magical animals try to eat the sun or the moon. In Hindu mythology, a serpent god, Rahu Ketu, wanted to eat the sun — but then his head was cut off. The Library of Congress wrote on their Folklife Today post that there were two new entities created by that.
Those are some of the ideas people have been asking about — and that experts have been pooh-poohing — as people in North America anticipated seeing a total eclipse, from Mazatlán to Montreal.
Monday’s total solar eclipse begins over Mexico’s Pacific Coast at around 11:07 a.m. PT, moving east through Texas and up to Maine, finally leaving the continent on Newfoundland’s Atlantic coast.
Folklife Today notes that humans take up the duty of stopping an eclipse in many cultures by making noise and beating on drums or gongs.
During the 2017 total solar eclipse it’s estimated that 150 million Americans viewed the event. There were around 100 documented cases of eye damage across all of America and Canada, according to Ralph Chou, an expert on eclipse eye safety with the University of Waterloo in Canada.
Far more people turned up in emergency rooms worried that they’d damaged their eyes. One of the largest eye Hospitals in the nation, the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai, has an osmotic surgeon who says that most of the people complained of watery eyes or blurred vision, but they were fine.
The Post-Eclipse Optical Anisotropy of the Cosmic Clouds and the Unpredictability of the Universe
“It’s so bright that we’re not actually capable of looking at it without either tearing or sort of not really feeling comfortable staring at this ball of light,” Deobhakta says.
Anticipating the post-eclipse ocular anxiety, at least one eye clinic in Buffalo, N.Y. is offering free eye checks immediately after the eclipse on April 8.