Asteroid bodies in the vitreous, snowball opacities, asteroid hyalitis or Benson's disease is a condition in which small, solid, stellate, spherical or disk-shaped bodies are suspended in a substantially normal vitreous. The opacities occur in strands or as discrete bodies without orderly arrangement. They are creamy, flat-white or shiny in appearance when viewed with the ophthalmoscope but sparkle brightly under the more intense illumination of the slit-lamp. By transmitted light they are dark. The ophthalmoscopic picture suggests stars on a clear night, an astronomical chart, snowballs, snowball blossoms or droplets of white paint suspended in water. When the globe is rotated, the bodies move with wavelike undulations ; they do not settle to the bottom of the vitreous chamber but return to their original positions after limited excursions. They are to be found in the whole vitreous or in any part of it, from the region of the ora serrata