didnt know where else to post and i dont trust sg or hb for intelligent answers.

anyway,
i have heard that staring into the sun can cause blindess. and i know it is a proven fact (ray charles).

but when i was a kid, me and a friend of mine would often stare directly into the sun long enough to actually make out the "shere".

both his and my vision are completely fine.

so my question is:
why didnt it do anything?


we stared directly into the sun for loooooooooong amounts of time.

i think the sun damages your eyes because it focuses light (thats what eyes do). so the retina gets too much damage.

my guess was that you only did it a few times, and so your eyes repaired themselves, or the sun wasnt very powerful at the time

I've heard various things. Such as it's the heating of the eye or the ultraviolet.

Also that the damage may not show up for decades. The truth? IDK.

Light cloud cover, fog, or smog could have decreased the intensity.

It's most dangerous when the sun is directly overhead. If you do it when the sun is just about to set, you have a thousand or so kilometers of atmosphere between you and it as shielding, and you're an extra 5000 kilometers away from it, give or take. In winter, you're even further away from it.

oh well, we did it at recess a lot which was around noon. but i dont remember what season(s?)

I used to stare at the sun through my welding shield, it's one of those automatic ones that darken when the incoming UV reaches a dangerous level. It would activate at between 7am and 6pm when I looked at the sun, before or after, the incoming UV wasn't high enough to trigger it. My boss disapproved of my ongoing science experiments.

I did it when I was about 12. Hurt like hell, and I had the after-image for days. Maybe that's what made me nearsighted, though the right eye is worse than the left. But, after 49 years since I did that, I can still see what I need to.

Where do you live? This plays a large factor.

If you were on the equator, you'd probably be blind.