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Stare into the sun

Here in Los Angeles there will be an annular solar eclipse visible on Sunday, with the moon covering 86% of the sun at its peak. Since it’s not necessarily wise to look directly at the sun, we made some ultra-high-tech eclipse viewers available to everyone here in the office.

The first 20 or so were snatched up pretty quickly, but there are still a few available if you find yourself in my office between now and Sunday.

And if you are in my office on Saturday or Sunday – get out of there! Jeez, there’s no privacy anymore.

If you look through the eclipse viewer and you aren’t looking in the direction of the sun, here’s what you see:

It’s actually pretty cool to look at the sun through these things, but also a little weird. Your brain seems to know you shouldn’t be doing it, but it’s safe, and the sun doesn’t look so tough when you filter out all that light.

On June 5th we also get to watch Venus pass in front of the sun. which is just as cool as a solar eclipse, but much more rare. It will probably look less impressive too—a little dot crawling across the sun—but I’ll still be out there looking at it.

The last time we could see that was 1882, and if you miss it on June 5th you’ll have to wait until 2117 for the next one.

At which point we’ll all be way too old to look at the sun.


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