Explain why you can look at a solar eclipse using a pinhole camera and not with your naked eye?

by Pete Reed
Question by Dracodragonrider D: Explain why you can look at a solar eclipse using a pinhole camera and not with your naked eye?
Explain why you can look at a solar eclipse using a pinhole camera and not with your naked eye?


Best answer:
Answer by Davebecause the rays from the sun are too bright/intense to be viewed without something to break up the rays before they reach your eyes, like a pinhole camera.

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Annular Solar Eclipse seen from Chiba, Japan May 21. 2012. Filmed with a Canon iVIS HF21 without filter as the clouds worked well enough for that role. 金環日食Below I will explain to you with numbers that are easy to comprehend, but first, here are some facts about the sun, the earth, and the moon and their actual sizes and distances between each other: The Sun is almost perfectly spherical and has a diameter of about 1392000 km, about 109 times that of Earth. The Earth's diameter is about 12700 km. The Moon's diameter is about 1/4 that of Earth, about 3175 km. The distance between the Sun and the Earth varies between 152 million km (around July) and 147 million km (around January). For simplicity we can say that the distance is on average 150 million km. The distance between the Moon and Earth varies between 356400km and 406700km, on average about 380000 km. Now, to put this into sizes and distances you and I are able to comprehend, let's scale everything down: Imagine a ball which has a diameter of 1 meter. This would be our Sun. About 108 meters away we will find our Earth which would be the size of a marble with a diameter slightly less than 1 cm (about 9.1mm). Finally, our Moon would be like a very small pea with a diameter of about 2.3mm. The distance between the small pea (the Moon) and the Marble (the Earth) would be about 27cm. Even though the Sun is much larger than the Moon, the Sun and the Moon appears about the same size while viewed from Earth due to the ...
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