Forget About Special Glasses – for the Best View of the Eclipse, You Just Need to Make a Pin Hole Made by Yourself
I was in high school the last time there was a massive solar eclipse over my hometown. Some teachers provided us with glasses, others helped to collect spectators from cereal boxes, and we went outside for an important moment. I think it was okay. But when I got home, my mother told me how she saw the eclipse.
She told me that she went outside with her colleagues and ended up sitting by a tree. And she noticed the shadow of its leaves on the ground. There was a small gap everywhere between the leaves, each spot of light having the same crescent shape as the eclipsing sun. It must have looked something like this:
When an eclipse occurs on Monday, you don’t even need a tree; You can make your own projector simply by poking through a piece of paper. Here’s a Pizza Hut showing you how to punch a nice clean eclipse hole in a pizza box:
Or, for a more standalone system, you can make a viewer out of the box. Save one of your giant Amazon boxes for a viewer to pop inside or look a little less funny with this handy viewer made out of a cereal box:
I used this viewer at school. Everything was fine, remember? The only thing I regretted was that I hadn’t looked back at anything else that could have acted as a pinhole. So get creative! You can make some pretty cool shadows with a colander, or, like astrophysicist Katie Mack, draw some eclipse cartoons:
And if you’re caught outdoors without any equipment, just cross your fingers – literally with tiny daylight between them – and watch your shadow. Like the guy in the image above, you will be holding an eclipse in the palm of your hand.