Watching the eclipse without glasses? Want a hole in your vision?

It’s the burning question of the week.

The solar eclipse Monday will be quite the Carl Sagan, Neal deGrasse Tyson moment for Americans to share. The idea is to walk away without frying your eyeballs.

There’s a reason mothers everywhere tell their children not to look directly at the sun. Eclipse or no eclipse, looking directly at the sun can damage the retinas of the eyes, creating a permanent hole in the center of vision. People must use certified glasses with lenses equipped for viewing the sun.

The sun burns at 10,340 degrees Fahrenheit, 93 million miles away, but it’s close enough to inflict plenty of damage. Imagine everything you see with a blur. That’s what can occur for a person who stares directly into the sun for too long.

Dr. Mark Michels, founder of Retina Care Specialists in Palm Beach Gardens, said it takes between 1 and 1 1/2 minutes for real damage to occur because of photo-chemical reaction in the eye. But what’s important to note, he says, is the damage is cumulative so looking away from the eclipse for a few minutes and then looking back is not at all safe.

“It’s the total viewing time — not just uninterrupted viewing time,” he said.

The damage is called solar retinopathy. Staring directly at the sun damages the retina, the fragile light-sensitive layer of tissue crucial to creating the image of the visual world. It’s often irreversible though some sufferers say they’ve seen some improvement over time.

“Essentially in layman’s terms you burn your retina and it leads to vision loss,” said Dr. Jorge Fortun, director of the Retina Service at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute in Palm Beach Gardens. “You don’t necessarily feel it. It can happen within a matter of seconds.”

Retinopathy can be caused by other conditions, as well, such as diabetes or abnormal blood flow.

Those who do not view the eclipse safely Monday afternoon between 1:24 and 4:19 p.m. are at risk of permanent eye damage, ophthalmologists say. Palm Beach County will be in the area of the country that is able to see about 80 percent of the sun blotted out by the shadow of the moon.

Only a 70-mile swath from Oregon to South Carolina will be treated to a full eclipse where the sun’s wicked-looking corona is all that will remain visible. For those lucky few, in that moment, they can take shed their protective glasses.

Related: Best places to watch the Great American eclipse.

USA Today reported how an Oregon man burned his retina as a high schooler while he looked at a partial eclipse in 1962. Lou Tomososki, 70, said that a silly dare between him and his buddy turned out to be the mistake of a lifetime.

“It doesn’t get any worse and it doesn’t get any better,” he said. “You know how the news people blur a license plate out. That’s what I have on the right eye, about the size of a pea, I can’t see around that.”

And sun worshipers, do not use your hip Oakleys and Ray-bans. Regular sun glasses aren’t dark enough to look directly at the sun. There also has been an issue of unsafe, counterfeit solar viewers. The American Astronomical Society has put out of a list of reputable vendors.

Fortun said eclipse observers will be safe if they use solar viewers. He said children of all ages should be supervised and advised not to take off the glasses. For those of us who wear glasses for vision, the solar viewers should be placed over them. Also, any camera must be equipped with a solar filter.

The Palm Beach County School District has been weighing options between safety and a rare educational moment.

“We continue to ask that parents speak to their children about the potential damage they can cause to their eyes by looking directly at the sun during the eclipse,” spokeswoman Kathy Burstein said.

Make no mistake. The country is gripped by solar eclipse fever. Michels said he was in Charleston, S.C., to drop off his son for college on Thursday and there were already throngs of people everywhere. “It’s a little nuts,” he said.

Michel worries that curiosity may get the best of people on Monday.

“We may have people who are so excited by looking at the sun they may not be aware of the damage they are doing to their eyes,” he said.

SOLAR ECLIPSE EYE SAFETY TIPS

• Ordinary sunglasses, even very dark ones, are not safe for looking at the sun.
• To safely view a partial eclipse, wear official eclipse viewing glasses that meet International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 12312-2 safety standards.
• If you wear regular eyeglasses, place the solar eclipse glasses on top of them.
• Supervise children using the special glasses to make sure they use them correctly. Adjust your child’s glasses to fit his or her face properly. If the glasses are too big, cut and tape them at the nose to make them smaller.
• Do not look at the eclipse through a camera, binoculars or telescope. This is important even if you are wearing eclipse glasses. The intense solar rays coming through these devices will damage the solar filter and your eyes.
• Use solar eclipse filters on camera lenses, binoculars and telescopes. Check the filter before the eclipse and if it is damaged or scratched, replace the filter.
• Use extra precaution, such as an indirect viewing method, if you are taking a medication that dilates your pupils – this reduces the time it takes to injure your eyes.

Source: Bascom Palmer Eye Center at the University of Miami

With counterfeit solar eclipse sunglasses everywhere, the American Astronomical Society has issued a list of reputable manufacturers and vendors. American Paper Optics APM Telescopes Celestron DayStar Explore Scientific Halo Solar Eclipse Spectacles Lunt Solar Systems Meade Instruments Rainbow Symphony Seymour Solar Thousand Oaks Optical