Slashdot Mirror
What It Looks Like When You Fry Your Eye In An Eclipse (npr.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Doctors in New York say a woman in her 20s came in three days after looking at the Aug. 21 eclipse without protective glasses. She had peeked several times, for about six seconds, when the sun was only partially covered by the moon. Four hours later, she started experiencing blurred and distorted vision and saw a central black spot in her left eye. The doctors studied her eyes with several different imaging technologies, described in the journal JAMA Ophthalmology, and were able to observe the damage at the cellular level.
"We were very surprised at how precisely concordant the imaged damage was with the crescent shape of the eclipse itself," noted Dr. Avnish Deobhakta, an assistant professor of ophthalmology at the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai Icahn School of Medicine, in an email to NPR. He says this was the most severely injured patient they saw after the eclipse. All in all, 22 people came to their urgent care clinic with concerns about possible eclipse-related damage, and most of them complained of blurred vision. Of those, only three showed some degree of abnormality in the retina. Two of them had only mild changes, however, and their symptoms have gone away. The young woman described in this case report, at last check, still has not recovered normal vision. For your viewing pleasure, The Verge has embedded several images of the woman's retinas in their report.
"We were very surprised at how precisely concordant the imaged damage was with the crescent shape of the eclipse itself," noted Dr. Avnish Deobhakta, an assistant professor of ophthalmology at the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai Icahn School of Medicine, in an email to NPR. He says this was the most severely injured patient they saw after the eclipse. All in all, 22 people came to their urgent care clinic with concerns about possible eclipse-related damage, and most of them complained of blurred vision. Of those, only three showed some degree of abnormality in the retina. Two of them had only mild changes, however, and their symptoms have gone away. The young woman described in this case report, at last check, still has not recovered normal vision. For your viewing pleasure, The Verge has embedded several images of the woman's retinas in their report.
Worth pointing out:
"She had peeked several times, for about six seconds, when the sun was only partially covered by the moon."
Uh, note that's what she said she did. We don't actually know how long she looked at the sun; she almost certainly underplayed how stupid she was when she talked to the doctor, since people usually do.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The one that really gave me a laugh was the one where he's looking at the eclipse and pointing to it, in case any of the White House staff forgot that the sun is in the sky and doesn't shine out of his ass.
https://timedotcom.files.wordp...
You are welcome on my lawn.
Perhaps she and those who did it should have tried to experiment with a magnifying glass before any attempt to stare at the sun. You might have tried this before when you were little.
If the magnifying glass started showing smoke on whatever it is focused in 6 seconds, staring at the sun at the time for the same duration could surely do the same to the eye.
Sir Isaac Newton stared into the sun a lot.
Yeah, and now he's dead!
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/07/...
Watching the celestial event outside her boyfriend's workplace, she noticed the changes around her, as it looked like dusk during the day. Payne looked up at the sun with her naked eye for a few seconds, but it was too bright.
She approached a woman nearby and asked whether she could borrow her glasses. The woman did not appear interested in viewing the eclipse and said she was "blind as a bat anyway." She told Payne she had borrowed them from a friend and agreed to let Payne use them.
Payne put on the glasses and looked up at the partial eclipse for 15 to 20 seconds. She didn't know what eclipse glasses were supposed to look like, but she remembered that the sun seemed particularly bright -- like looking at it with sunglasses on.
"But it didn't bother me, because I thought it would be a great experience to catch a solar eclipse the proper way," Payne told CNN.
She removed the glasses, returned them to the woman and left.
Six hours later, Payne noticed a weird dark spot in the center of her vision. She told her friends and family, but they told her to wait a day. After all, everyone had been outside looking up at the sun, and it was normal to feel "weird."
The next day, Payne lost vision in the center of her left eye.
So "a few seconds" is six, according to TFS. The borrowed glasses story sounds exactly like something someone would make up to shift blame from themselves, but we'll never know for sure. Besides, she admits she only sought glasses after staring at the sun bare-eyed proved "too bright."
So far, it's a nightmare, and sometimes it makes me very sad when I close my eyes and see it," Payne said. "It's embarrassing. People will assume I was just one of those people who stared blankly at the sun or didn't check the person with the glasses.
She is literally "one of those people," as she stared at the sun. She then borrowed glasses she couldn't verify as safe. I don't know what it means to "check the person with the glasses" but the fact that they were already blind might have been a red flag.
The NPR article is incorrect. She only looked at the sun without glasses for a few seconds. She found that uncomfortable. A woman nearby had eclipse viewing glasses but wasn't viewing the eclipse because she said she was blind as a bat anyway. So she asked to borrow the glasses.
She then viewed the sun for 15-20 seconds through those glasses, which they suspect is when the damage occurred. The glasses were probably fakes which didn't block all the rays of the sun. So this isn't a story about an idiot staring at the sun without glasses and destroying her vision as the NPR article implies. It's a story about some evil person destroying someone else's vision for life just so they could make a quick buck.
(Though I suppose it's possible she really is an idiot and made the whole thing up to hide her embarrassment.)
A simple story that I think is an easier to understand explanation of the variety in risk tolerance.
I was fortunate enough to spend some time in Antarctica. Part of this time was minding a fuel hose about 10cm high, and I observed several groups of penguins negotiate the hose.
A pack of twenty would waddle along and hit the obstacle of the hose. They walk up and down along it a bit to see if they can get around.
Then two penguins jump the hose and walk on.
The rest of the pack, observing that those two are ok quickly jump over and continue on their way.
Except for three, who hesitate for some reason. They walk up and down again, they get increasingly agitated as the pack gets further away. Two eventually jump over. The last is running up and down the line, freaking out at being left behind and eventually trips and falls over the hose. Picks itself up and sprints after the pack.
Penguins display the same basic behaviour when confronted with any obstacle, like a group of people playing tourist or jumping into leopard seal infested water.
I never saw one stupid enough to stare into the sun though.