At the local astronomy club meeting I gave a short presentation on the Iridium flashes, to see if anyone else was interested in observing one. One fellow with a whopper telescope (20-inch diameter) wanted to know what would happen if he were unlucky enough to be looking at something at the spot in the sky just where the satellite happened to flash. Certainly it would be dazzling. Could it conceivably cause eye damage? If not in that size telescope, what about in an even larger one? My first answer was "of course not", but then he told me that even in his size scope it is dangerous to look at the moon without a filter. To back this up he pointed out that he can make a piece of paper start smoking by holding it at prime focus while his scope is pointed at the full moon. Hmmm. You can't make an extended source of light any brighter by magnifying it. However, if the satellite makes a perfect mirror, then at SOME (implausibly high?) level of magnification all you will see is the mirror-image of the sun, and thus looking at the satellite should become, if for only an instant, approximately equivalent to looking at the sun. That is certainly not something you want to do. Has anybody tried "running the numbers" on this out of curiosity? Granted, it would take extraordinarily bad luck to point at an Iridium flare with a huge amateur telescope at high power by accident.