Video Shows Result Of Looking Straight At Sun Through Telescope

Terrifying video reveals why you should never look directly at a solar eclipse: Astronomer uses a pig’s eye to show the horrific results of staring at the sun.

A terrifying video that shows the dangers of looking directly at the sun through a telescope has surfaced.

British television presenter and astronomer Mark Thompson made the video, which shows the frightening effects of looking directly at the sun through a telescope lens.

It serves as yet another warning to viewers to watch the eclipse.

Thompson used a pig’s eye to demonstrate the effects because, he said: ‘I am not stupid enough to put my own eye to the eyepiece of a telescope lined up on the sun.’

The video, which he warns could be hard to watch for squeamish viewers, shows Thompson holding the pig’s eye up to a telescope that he says is directed towards the sun.

After about 20 seconds under the lens of the scope, the eyeball flashes and starts to smoke.

‘I’ve got to tell you, the smell is pretty grim,’ Thompson says.

The video then shows the results: the pig’s eye has a burn directly on the cornea of the lens.

Thompson then dissects the eye to check on damage to the retina. After cutting away to it, he finds a brown patch, which he says could be damage from the sun.

At the end of the video, Thompson adds that if the eye had been human, there would have been serious damage to the eye of the person.

Scientists have already been warning people to avoid looking directly at the sun during the eclipse and NASA has said the only safe way to look at the uneclipsed or partially eclipsed sun is through special solar filters such as eclipse glasses.

Thompson’s video, which was posted in April 2016 as a warning ahead of a different celestial event, should deter people from even considering watching the eclipse through a telescope lens.

WHAT HAPPENS DURING AN ECLIPSE

During a total solar eclipse, the moon completely blocks the face of the sun, NASA explains.

This reveals the ‘pearly white halo’ of the sun’s corona – its outer atmosphere, which is invisible to the naked eye at all other times.

For this phenomenon to take place, the moon and the sun must be perfectly aligned, allowing the moon to appear as though it’s the exact size of the sun.

‘A total eclipse is a dance with three partners: the moon, the sun and Earth,’ said Richard Vondrak, a lunar scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

‘It can only happen when there is an exquisite alignment of the moon and the sun in our sky.’

According to eclipse chaser Michael Aisner, the math of this actually taking place is ‘boggling.’

‘The moon is 400 times smaller in diameter than the sun, and the sun is 400 times further away,’ he explained in an eclipse-viewing tip list shared with Dailymail.com.

‘Bingo – a perfect fit even though the sun is 100 million miles farther away than the moon.’

Source : dailymail.co.uk