BALTIMORE — An eclipse will turn the big light off this Monday.
While a total eclipse is safe to look at, in places like Baltimore, it will only be a partial one.
That means it's especially dangerous to try to glance at it directly, even for a second.
A Johns Hopkins professor explained that concentrated sunlight can easily focus on the retina cells in your eye and burn those cells.
"The problem, if you burn the retina, is that it's like brain tissue," said Neil Bressler. "If you destroy some of those cells, it won't grow back. It's not like if you scrape your skin, new skin cells will grow back. You'll permanently lose those and that will result in a blank spot where you're trying to see."
Those who do want to see the eclipse are urged to use appropriate eye protection.
You can't just use regular sunglasses; make sure those glasses are the real thing.
Check the inside of the frames; there will be a code: 12312-2.
That lets you know your eyes are protected.
"There is no point during a partial solar eclipse where it's safe to look directly at the sun," says Dr. Ashley Greeley, a NASA heliophysicist.
If you don’t want to buy them, every location of the Enoch Pratt Free Library is giving away free pairs of eclipse glasses, one per person.
And your eyes are not the only things that need protection; you should also protect your phone.
“But you don’t want to point even your camera lens from your phone directly at the sun because there are sensors in there that could be easily damaged by the sun," says Dr. Greeley.
You can still take a video of the eclipse, but place your eclipse glasses over the camera before pointing it at the sun.
