Reflected 200mW Green Laser in Eye

Hello there,

This is my first post and I unfortunately have to start it off on a somewhat bad note. I have been fascinated with lasers for awhile now and have always been exceedingly careful. However, just a few hours ago, I was foolish enough to toy around with my Class IIIb 532nm 200mW green laser pointer and was shining it out the window when the reflected beam hit me in the eye for less than a fraction of a second. Thankfully, I reflexively closed my eye and dropped the pointer. (For all intents and purposes, I wasn't aware that completely transparent glass could still reflect laser beams.)

There was a dark spot on my eye (like the after effects from the flash of a camera) for about a half a minute and it has since disappeared. There has not been any noticeable vision loss when I took the amsler grid test.

So, my question is, how much of the laser was reflected by the glass? I would hope that the reflected beam has been defused or isn't as powerful as a direct beam or even a beam reflected in a mirror.

Suffice to say that I will always wear proper safety goggles from hence forth.

Thank you very much for the advice.

The window would reflect about 5-10% of the laser, but I doubt that the laser was truly 200mW unless you have verified it with an LPM.

I think you'll be fine though. Just watch out for any further symptoms.

here is some data on that, note the glass test
http://laserpointerforums.com/f53/laser-reflections-measured-lpm-83409.html#post1204352
while yours can be more or less most likely you received 3-10mw of laser in your eye
you should be ok but be careful of anything reflective ,, your lucky it wasn't a mirror..

do you have a link to the laser? that way we can help figure out if it was actually 200mw or not ..

even if it was you are probably safe

Well I once got a 100mW green laser directly in my eye from a mirror... the afterimage "dot" went away after a few minutes and I could see fine, no problems. But I still suspect some eye damage