can you make glasses to watch a solar eclipse?

welders' goggles or glasses provide enough protection.

I made an eclipse watcher with two layers of fully-exposed Black and white film in a cardboard frame. As far as I know, I have no eye damage resulting from using them for watching the eclipse, or later, sunspots. Of course, now everyone's gone digital it might be hard to even find black&white film.

Another time, watching an eclipse in India, I used government-provided cardboard glasses with a metallic film inside. Again, it seemed to do the job pretty well.

Now this is only information coming from a friend of mine, but when he was in school his teacher taught them how to watch one from doing something with a cardboard box. He told me it was exactly like what the red hed with glasses from the disney cartoon "Recess" does. Ive seen the eposoide she explains what she does, still dont know if the whole thing is true though but you might want to look into it.

It's a form of pinhole camera ... but you don't look through the hole. Poke a tiny hole in an opaque sheet of something, hold it up, look down at the floor and watch the spot of light that is coming through the hole onto the floor.

You can get the same effect from any small spot of light - the light coming through leaves will show the eclipse, the light coming through a wire mesh picnic table, etc.

You could contact the Museum of Science and Industry in Tampa, FL. I watched an eclipse there with some kind of special eclipse glasses. They were sort of like the cheap cardboard 3D glasses you get at a haunted house, only with some sort of dark film instead of the red and blue. Couldn't have been very expensive to produce, since they handed them out for free to anybody who showed up.

Defyalllogic,

Yes, first fill the bottom of a bucket with water, the murkier the better.

As the sun is blotted out, the water will freeze and make a round ice lense, through which you can. . . .

No, wait! That's how Calliopenjo starts fires without matches.

Sorry, these "cool" junk science threads tend to blend together.

Here was something I found via MSNBC. It's from a NASA dude and there's a list of references at the bottom that might help you in your search.

It used to be common to coat glass with smoke, soot, for viewing eclipses. To do that one holds a piece of glass over a smoky fire until you can't see anything through it. I know of people using them, and they hadn't become blind, but I can't go any further. You might see what a search ofr "smoked glass eclipse" finds (I just checked, and there are many results).

didn't Newton make glasses out of gold foil to look at the sun through?