You gazed skyward Monday to witness in awe as the moon plunged the Earth into a cold shadow by temporarily blotting out most — or, in some areas, all — of the sun’s light.
And despite the warnings leading up to the Great American Solar Eclipse, against your own better judgment, you pulled down your protective glasses for the briefest of moments to steal a furtive glance at the sun with your naked eyes.
You’re going to be OK. Or at least you’re probably going to be OK, according to Jeff Pettey, an ophthalmologist with the John A. Moran Eye Center.
“Even our president took a little quick gander, as we all have,” Pettey said Tuesday. “A very short, under a couple of seconds, look at the sun would likely not cause any damage.”
While President Donald Trump’s unprotected glimpse of the eclipse caught the attention and mockery of the nation, many eclipse viewers took to social media to confess or poke fun at their own acts of ocular defiance.
On Tuesday, representatives of Intermountain Healthcare and Salt Lake Regional Medical Center said the hospital systems had not seen any patients with eclipse-related injuries. And Pettey said symptoms would have manifested immediately after viewing the sun, rather than building over time.
“Perhaps it either intensifies or they may just notice it more the next day,” Pettey said, ”but it’s something that doesn’t all the sudden appear later. It’s pretty immediate.”
While prolonged exposure to the sun can cause blindness, Pettey said even severe damage from solar gazing is unlikely to result in an absolute loss of sight. Instead, he said, a person’s central vision would become distorted or blurred, similar to the short-term effect of a camera flash or other bright lights.
“You‘re going to have a little central spot, a smudge, a gray spot right in the center of your vision wherever you look,” Pettey said. “Depending on the severity of it, that could be permanent or slowly that could improve over the course of weeks or months.”
Pettey said the danger of looking directly at the sun stems from a combination of two factors: the amount of time exposed and the relative health of an individual’s eyes. Consequently, he said, there’s no hard-and-fast rule for how long you can view an eclipse without causing permanent or even temporary damage.
For those worried that a momentary lapse in precaution may have caused irrevocable damage, Pettey recommended contacting a medical professional or conducting an at-home graph paper test.
“If you look at a piece of graph paper and you can see all the little lines, vertical and horizontal, you’re doing fine and you’re likely not going to develop any problems,” he said. ”That’s what the president should do this morning.”
Follow @bjaminwood