Worried you might have hurt your eyes watching the eclipse?
If they’re just a bit sore or dry, it doesn’t necessarily mean anything bad happened. It’s normal for your eyes to tire from staring at something in the distance for a long time. If you were diligent about wearing eclipse glasses or watching the eclipse through a pinhole, you don’t need to worry, experts say.
“If you stare at the sun for a split second, it won’t damage your eyes,” Dr. Jason Comander, director of the Inherited Retinal Disorders Service at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, said in a blog post on the hospital’s website. “You may see an afterimage and it can go away.”
But if you were peeking again and again, you may have damaged your retina. “Surprisingly, it does not hurt to burn your retinas,” Comander said.
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If you’ve damaged your eyes, you won’t feel pain but will notice visual problems within four to six hours or sometimes after 12 hours. So, if you’re reading this now and your vision is normal, you are probably unharmed.
According to the American Academy of Ophthalmology, the main symptoms of retinal damage are:
- Blurry vision
- Headache
- A blind spot in your central vision in one or both eyes
- Increased sensitivity to light
- Distorted vision, in which a straight line looks bent, or a door jamb looks curvy
- Changes in the way you see color.
The retina is the layer of cells at the back of the eye. It senses light and sends signals to the brain to enable vision. Sunlight pouring through the lens in your eye can damage the retina in the same way as the sun can start a small fire when focused through a magnifying glass, according to the American Academy of Ophthalmology.
After the 2017 eclipse, two people suffered eye damage that appeared as a crescent-shape burn on their retinas, like a mirror image of the eclipse. A New York woman in her 20s had blurred and distorted vision and saw a black spot at the center of her vision in her left eye. She had looked at a partial eclipse without protective glasses.
The other patient, a 34-year-old man in California, injured only one eye, possibly because he peeked through an unfiltered telescope or camera. He had a blind spot that eventually resolved.
There is no treatment for sun-damaged retinas. Some people will suffer permanent vision loss — a blind spot or distortion — while others recover after three to six months.
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Felice J. Freyer can be reached at felice.freyer@globe.com. Follow her @felicejfreyer.