How to watch the eclipse without damaging your eyes
WYOMING, Mich. (WOOD) — If you are planning to watch the solar eclipse Monday afternoon, you will need to take precautions to protect your eyes.
Doctors with University of Michigan Health-West Ophthalmology warn that even watching the eclipse for a short time can cause damage if you don’t have protective eyewear.
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“I’m really excited for the eclipse as well. It’s just really important to really focus on eye health,” said Dr. Matthew Borr, an ophthalmologist. “When the moon gets in front of the sun, it takes away some of the brightness. It decreases that reflex to look away from the sun, and it actually makes it more dangerous at this point because you don’t have that reflex to look away. You don’t realize that it’s causing permanent damage.”
He says you should use eclipse glasses to protect your eyes.
“The eclipse glasses are 1,000 times stronger than the average sunglass and multiple times stronger than welding glass, so it’s very important to only use the eclipse glasses,” Borr said.
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Children should be supervised with eclipse glasses or use a homemade pinhole projector.
“Here in western Michigan, we won’t experience any totality, so there’s really no safe time to take off your eclipse glasses during the eclipse. Even small, brief glimpses can cause damage to your eyes,” Borr said. “The eye kind of works like a camera or a microscope, and it focuses light onto the back of the eye onto the retina. I describe it kind of like the film in a camera — that film can get burned by the sunlight because it’s focused so brightly.”
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Borr says you should get your glasses from a place you can trust.
“ISO (International Organization for Standardization) certification is very important. That’s what makes them reliable. It’s also important to get them from a reliable vendor, usually not buying online, because there have been counterfeits in the past,” Borr said. “And just making sure that they’re not damaged, punctured, scraped, scratched. Anything like that would make them not safe to use.”
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If you already have glasses from 2017, you might be able to reuse them.
“As long as you take a look at them and they are undamaged, they are useful,” Borr said. “There is no expiration date on them. They’re just a filter, and so they should last multiple years as long as you take good care of them.”
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