Scott Roby, director of the SUNY Oswego planetarium and an associate professor of physics, explains how to safely watch a solar eclipse, like the Aug. 21 event.
"If you want to watch the partial eclipse which is from 1:30 to 3:30 in New York on Monday (Aug. 21), you want to get some solar eclipse glasses. These are from Meade. They make telescopes, they know what they're doing. You want to get good, safe solar eclipse glasses. You can get them online fairly cheap.
"They're such a dark filter if they're done correctly that I recommend, be sure you're in a safe place when you put them on because when you put them on you cannot see anything. I cannot see the ground, I cannot see the horizon. The only thing I can see is the sun in the sky and that's it, they're that dark. So don't put these on near a cliff."
Roby offered videographer Jim Kearns the opportunity to put them in front of the camera, and they blotted out all the light.
"But it will show up like a little pale yellow dot," Roby explained.
"There's another way that doesn't involve glasses," Roby said of the pinhole camera technique. "You can take a piece of cardboard and you cut a hole in it like so. Now it should be a pinhole, this is not a pinhole but it gives you the idea. You make a pinhole, you get a nice focused image of the sun and you'll see the moon crossing over the bottom half of it in New York. And that will take two hours to cross the bottom. So the partial eclipse lasts two hours. For the total eclipse, which you can't see in New York that only lasts about two minutes and you have to go down to Tennessee or Nebraska."