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Comment by jdavis703 | Hacker News Reader

FWIW me and my coworkers looked at the eclipse with no protection (it was too foggy to use our pinhole cameras). I didn't develop any vision issues, and I don't think the others did either.

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Watch out over the next couple of months, and don't rub your eyes if you think they feel like they have sand in them, just go to the doctor. There was a reddit thread about people who damaged eyes after looking at an eclipse, and several of them showed effects later.

It's funny that after hearing dozens of warnings about how looking at the sun will permanently hurt your eyesight, people GO and actually LOOK at the sun without protection. I suppose stupidity has no limits?

NASA says it's safe - for the brief period of totality.

  During the short time when the moon completely obscures
  the sun – known as the period of totality – it is safe
  to look directly at the star

https://www.nasa.gov/content/eye-safety-during-a-total-solar...

Same here. So much fog cover in SF that you couldn’t even see it through eclipse glasses. Normal sunglasses were just perfect and naked eye was okay for a few seconds at a time.

I mostly looked at it through the display on my camera though. Didn’t even cross my mind it could cause damage. Luckily it didn’t

Of course it depends on lots of factors, but to see the equivalent eye damage, do an image search for “solar retinopathy”. It’s not just theoretical.

Absolutely, I know it's not just a myth. It's just that whether you need eclipse glasses is more nuanced than "always wear them." If you're going to stare at an eclipse for multiple seconds on a cloudless day you're probably going to be in for a world of hurt.

Staring at the Sun is bad, no matter when you do it. The Sun emits no extra photons during an eclipse. Your pupils do expand due to physiological responses of the decreased light, however.

In San Francisco the eclipse was only partial and behind a cloud of fog. In that case looking at it's no worse than looking at the sun behind a cloud on a non-eclipse day.

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