Almost all of us know that looking into the Sun is probably not a good idea. Even if we have a glance on it by mistake, we feel our eyes in utter discomfort and those black clouds appear in front of the eyes almost immediately. The corneas of our eyes are unable to withstand the UV radiation from the sun, even if it is 150 million kilometres away!
To demonstrate the effect of how the sunlight can damage our eyes, one astronomer took an added initiative and designed a rather squeamish yet very illustrative experiment. He used a pig eye and held it below a telescope’s glass, pointed at the sun for only 20 seconds. After 20 seconds, the damage to the eye was simply incredible. WARNING: Do not watch if you are easily disgusted and nauseated.
Pig’s eye was used as it is pretty similar to a human eye in structure and composition. And after only 20 seconds, the pig’s eye had a giant hole in it with the retina severely damaged.
The scientist, Mark Thompson remarked in the video,
“If this was a human eye there would almost certainly be some pretty severe damage, and that is why it’s a very, very bad idea to look at the Sun through the eye piece of a telescope.”
Although this is quite an extreme way to demonstrate the fact, we can’t deny it is “eye-catching” and pretty effective!