I think the claim that looking at the sun will hurt your eyes is bogus. They just don't want us to notice the fact it looks a whole lot closer than 93,000,000 miles away.
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Think it won't hurt? Here's my 10x50 binoculars: it'll look even closer . Want to prove not only astronomers wrong? The only one stopping you: is you .
You know what you'll be admitting every second you're not . Why listen to those who warn about looking directly at the sun, lenses or no? But hey: it's your retinas' funeral, OP...! [/Doug Piranha-levels of sarcasm]
Feel free to do so however much you wish, then.
Just don’t complain that nobody had warned you about what a stupid idea that was.
I think most everybody has probably looked at the Sun at least once in their life. I know I have. And, under most circumstances, it hurts. Not in the "OMG my doctor says it damaged my retinas" kind of way, but in the "ow! that's painful! I should stop doing that!" kind of way.
I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation, and unless I’m mistaken about how stereoscopy works, in order to determine the size or distance of a sun-sized object via a human’s depth perception, it would have to be within 0.3 AU, otherwise the parallax would be too small for a human eye to detect. (The sun is 1 AU.) Also it would have to not be giving off a blinding glare which makes it hard to tell exactly what you’re looking at. You also need a visual reference as to distance to determine the size, or a reference as to the size to determine the distance; a blank sky tells you nothing. It could just as easily be just beyond the moon or a galaxy-massed colossus hundreds of light-years away for all you know, just by looking. (Of course you probably also think that the moon is like 100km away or something)
“it looks a whole lot closer than 93,000,000 miles away.”
You’re practiced at measuring the distance to things like the sun? What details do you find lacking?
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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