Reply With QuoteYou can't look at the sun even when the moon in in the way as you will burn your retina's in your eyes. You have to look at it indirectly or though some kind of filter device.
The eclipse really not that big of a deal to me. I'd rather see a Tiger in the Wild in India from the Back of a very big elephant than look at the solar eclipse again though a pin hole camera. Now that would be a big deal to me and one of my items on my bucket list.
But, if you have never seen a solar eclipse before, then you will enjoy the experience. I'm 66 and not much impresses me these days. I wish I could get more excited about things like this.
Just be careful and don't look directly at the sun during the eclipse.
One the other hand this eclipse is a great example of the kind of light I used for work and with my microscope when I was doing asbestos fiber analysis. It's called Central Stop Microscopy. The special ocular 10X lens has a black dot that's inserted into the light path so that the light coming from below has to go around the black dot before the objective lens could see it and bring it into the light path. This oblique light along with a polarizing filter and some special emersion oils with certain special refractive indexes are used to identify the asbestos fibers and distinguish them from other types of mineral or organic fibers under the polarizing light microscope.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark-field_microscopy
So the black inside the objective lens is similar to the moon blocking the sunlight. The same effect occurs basically. However the light source on the microscope is not a bright as the sun and you can look directly at that light without harming your eyes. I can turn the light source energy down on the microscope but you can't do that with the sunlight unless you use a neutral density type filter. But you will have to filter out a whole lot of the sunlight before you can look at the sun. More than sunglasses are required. I used a pin hole devise to project the sunlight though a pin hole in a flat piece of cardboard to project the eclipsed image onto some thing where I could see it.
Google how to look at the sun during a solar eclipse.
https://pwg.gsfc.nasa.gov/istp/outreach/sunobserve1.pdf
When you look at the sunlight it's coming from a long distance away and the light waves are parallel to each other. When they strike the moon most are reflected back away from our view. But some light sneaks around the moon and gets past for us to see. That very similar to central stop microscopy. The only thing different in that the light I used had to travel though a glass slide, the crystal fibers structures, the emersion refractive index oil and the class cover slip before it entered into the objective lens and travels up though the microscope though the ocular lens and into my eye.
Originally Posted by Shaggy
