How to safely watch Solar Eclipse 2017: Advice from an astronomer

Everyone knows that you should not look at the sun! Not with your naked eye, not with sunglasses and certainly not with binoculars or with a telescope. Our sun might be just an ordinary star, but it’s extremely close to us — about 269,000 times closer than the next nearest star. This makes the sun very, very bright.

Everyone knows that you should not look at the sun. But what about during an eclipse? This situation will confront us on Aug. 21, when the entirety of North America, along with parts of South America, Africa,