You can seriously hurt your eyes and even go blind. “You don’t even want to wear them walking around.How do you watch a solar eclipse without solar glasses? Never look directly at the Sun without proper eye protection. “You definitely don’t even want to wear them driving,” Young says. So you wouldn’t want to wear eclipse goggles while, say, driving a car?
“When you look outside you only see the sun.” “These things block out such a huge amount of light they’re hundreds of thousands of times stronger than regular sunglasses,” Young adds. You can’t-I don’t even know where this came from-but you can’t use old film negative. “I’ve certainly read some really bad bits of misinformation. Even welder’s glass is no good unless it’s at least shade 14 or darker, NASA says. Regular ole Ray-Bans will not protect your peepers. Sevareid, who demonstrated this technique for me and my classmates during a partial solar eclipse a couple decades ago.)įor direct observation, however, the DIY route isn’t an option. (Shout-out to my sixth-grade science teacher Mrs. This way, you can see a shadow of a crescent-shaped sun on a piece of paper rather than in the sky, all while protecting your eyes. NASA has a special website devoted to safe eclipse viewing.) The middle-school-science-class version of an indirect eclipse viewer is a pinhole projector-you can build one with two pieces of paper and a paperclip. Looking directly at the sun can cause permanent retinal damage, even when it’s painless. That said, you don’t need eclipse specs if you want to view the eclipse indirectly-as in, you can still be outside for the event, you just cannot look up. Glasses will be quite helpful for the the vast majority of Americans outside of the path of totality, where the eclipse will remain partial and it will never get completely dark. “Experience totality, then, as soon as the bright sun begins to reappear, replace your solar viewer to glance at the remaining partial phases.”Ī map of the United States showing the path of the Augtotal solar eclipse. It’s safe to take them off “only when the moon completely covers the sun’s bright face and it suddenly gets quite dark,” NASA says on its eclipse safety website. It’s a bit like New Year’s Eve, which can be boiled down to the last minute of the old year and the first moments of the new one, and which, incidentally, is another occasion for funny-looking glasses.įor those lucky enough to find themselves in the Oregon-to-South-Carolina path of totality, eclipse goggles are only necessary before and after the total eclipse. If you’re smack-dab in the middle of the path of totality, a 70-mile-wide moonshadow that runs from Oregon to South Carolina, the entire thing begins and ends in under three minutes. “But-happily?-we have a new, more effective way to announce fleeting products that can mark these time ‘slivers.’”Īn eclipse is about as slivered as it gets. “We are, as a culture, parsing time more finely and more variously,” says Grant McCracken, an anthropologist who writes about the intersection of culture and commerce. Properly manufactured eclipse goggles actually are useful, it turns out, but they still occupy a space made possible by the web: super-targeted merchandise for increasingly niche events. After all, the internet-assisted production chain allows for “T-shirts and coffee cups that can be printed with memes the day they go viral,” says Judith Donath, the author of The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online. The opportunistic quality to this kind of merchandising-and the wider Zazzle-fication of the web-made me wonder whether eclipse goggles are more festive than functional. companies: American Paper Optics, Rainbow Symphony, Thousand Oaks Optical, and TSE 17. NASA is now recommending only using eclipse glasses that have been manufactured by four U.S. That includes unsafe knockoffs, NASA warns. If you search a retail website like Amazon for “eclipse” these days, you’ll be inundated by eclipse-related eyewear. You need them to safely observe an un-eclipsed or partially eclipsed sun directly.” “They’ve at least existed for most of the 21st century. “We call them safe solar-viewing glasses,” Young told me. And it’s why, with a rare solar eclipse approaching in the United States on August 21, there’s suddenly a cottage industry around eclipse safety goggles. And this is why, during the partial phases of an eclipse-just before and after the sun appears to be almost totally blotted out-you should never look directly at it. It’s when most of the sun is blocked out, like during an eclipse, that things get a bit dicey. People are generally pretty good at not staring directly at the sun for this reason.