Woman gets crescent-shaped eye damage from staring at eclipse

NEW YORK CITY — A woman found out first hand how a solar eclipse fries your eyes, after coming away from the Great American Eclipse with a crescent-shaped eye burn.

CNN reports that on August 21, Nia Payne had gone to her boyfriend's workplace at Staten Island to see the eclipse. She peeked at the sun with her naked eye for a few seconds before borrowing glasses from a woman nearby.

The 26-year-old didn't know what eclipse glasses were supposed to look like, but claims the sun still seemed bright through the pair she had on.

Hours later, she noticed her vision getting blurry, and she began seeing a weird dark spot. She lost partial vision in her left eye the next day.

Doctors examining her eyes were shocked to find that the damaged area in the left retina was crescent-shaped, making it look exactly like the eclipse.

They suspect that the glasses she used were either defective or fake, which allowed solar radiation to penetrate through and cause retinal damage.

The condition, known as solar retinopathy, is permanent and is currently untreatable. Instead, Payne has had to retrain her vision to cope, but she'll probably have a permanent crescent-shaped void in her sight for the rest of her life.