What Should I Do with My Extra Eclipse Glasses?

Transcript

ERIC: From the Museum of Science in Boston, this is Pulsar, a podcast where we don protective eyewear to search for answers to the most timely questions we get from our visitors. I'm your host, Eric, and the Great American Eclipse of 2024...is over. I hope that you were able to experience the wonder of the universe by observing this rare occurrence either during the phase of totality, or by using eclipse glasses, which block nearly all light. This is the only way to safely look directly at the sun. Since over half a billion people live in an area that experienced at least a partial eclipse on April 8th, there are a lot of these eclipse glasses sitting on people's kitchen counters right now. And visitors have asked us: what should we do with them? The short answer is: just don't throw them in the trash. But to discuss what you can do with them, I am joined again by Talia from our Charles Hayden Planetarium team, once again under the dome of the planetarium itself. Talia, thanks for chatting with me about eclipse glasses.

TALIA: Welcome back to the dome.

ERIC: So there's tons of talk about donating these eclipse glasses and recycling them and making sure that they don't end up in landfills. But I've really been encouraging people to keep them, because they are not a one-use thing. And the sun is always there to observe. It's something that's just kind of awesome to be able to pop on a pair of protective eyewear and just stare directly at the sun.

TALIA: Yeah, there used to be guidance that if your eclipse glasses were more than three years old, you should get rid of them. And that is no longer considered to be you true. They're good. As long as the lenses are not damaged, or not scratched, or punctured and are still in place in the cardboard frame. Those are perfectly good for looking at the sun. And that is something you can do on a regular basis, especially right now we are approaching solar maximum, which is the period of the sun's 11-year cycle of activity where it is most active, which means there's going to be more sunspots visible. And you can look at those with your solar eclipse glasses.

ERIC: Yeah, so safety first, if you're going to store them, keep them properly. Don't just stick them in the junk drawer that you have in your kitchen. You know what I'm talking about listeners, if you're listening with a group, you're all looking at the person who is the biggest offender of stuffing everything that they don't know where to put it in that junk drawer. If you do that with your eclipse glasses, they will get punctured or torn, and they won't be safe to look at the sun.

TALIA: Yes, old eclipse glasses are safe, but only if the lenses are completely intact. So no scratches, no punctures, and they are still safely seated in the cardboard frames.

ERIC: So I've got a couple of eclipse glasses that I was handing out to family and people around me. I've got a small hard case to keep them in. You can use probably a sunglasses case or an eyeglasses case, just don't stick them in the attic or the garage, you want to keep them at room temperature. So find a spot where you're not going to lose them entirely. You will know where they are. Keep them with your binoculars or other stuff that you use to look at stuff, like other observing tools, so that you know where they are. But yeah, I mean, you don't even need to wait until the next eclipse, you can just look at the sun anytime. And those sunspots are really dramatic. So can you talk about what a sunspot is?

TALIA: So the sun's magnetic field is crazy bananas, and is just looping in and out of the sun all the time. And oftentimes where it's puncturing the surface, you get a sunspot. This is a region that is cooler than the surface of the sun around it. So it looks darker. They can be very, very, very large. They can be larger than Jupiter, they are frequently larger than the earth. And these are also the sources of solar flares, all that stuff that generates you know, these big storms on the sun, they usually come from sunspots. So they can be very big and, like you said, dramatic looking. And they're more likely to be appearing on the sun as we are approaching the period of the sun's maximum activity.

ERIC: Yeah, there was a lot of really great timing with this past eclipse and another silver lining is that it is an interesting time to look at the sun with those eclipse glasses. Keep them around, keep an eye on the news for when there might be activity. NASA has multiple spacecraft that are constantly staring at the sun and taking pictures. So the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), you can go on NASA's website and see pictures that were downloaded from those spacecraft, like, minutes ago to show you how many sunspots there are. And if there's a big enough region, and if there's a big black patch on there, you can put on your eclipse classes and go out and possibly see it. I think that's just so cool that you can do that.

TALIA: It's definitely super cool.

ERIC: There are a whole bunch of other solar eclipses coming up that you could use them for. We've got a whole other episode. So you can check that out, where we talked about the eclipses coming up in the rest of 2024 and 2025 and 2026. There's a couple more chances from here in New England, and definitely all over the world, to see partial eclipses. So definitely keep them for that. Keep them stored somewhere you're going to be able to pull them out. So you don't have to order them online again just before the next eclipse when everybody is trying to find them, because they were hard to find. And so finally, donating them so they can get recycled. This is something where I hope people will keep them. But if you ended up with twenty pairs, if you got them for your family, and then everybody handed them back to you, and you have more than you'll ever need, there are things that you can do with them to make sure that they will get used by someone else.

TALIA: Yes, if you want to get rid of them, then I highly encourage you to consider donating them. There are organizations that will collect used eclipse glasses that are still in good conditions. Specifically, you can look at Eclipse Glasses USA, they are collecting glasses that are in good condition that will then be sent to South America for the annular eclipse coming up in October that's gonna be visible from parts of Argentina. And those glasses, if you donate them to Eclipse Glasses USA, they're going to be sent to schoolchildren in the countries that are going to get to experience this annular eclipse, which, there is no point during an annular eclipse where it's safe to look up at the sun without eclipse glasses. So that's where these glasses will go. You can also donate them to Astronomers Without Borders, they've got collection sites all across the country. You can go to their website, and you can see what collection site is near you. They're setting up at places like libraries, town halls, stuff like that. And you can donate your eclipse classes and they will check and see and make sure that they are still safe, and they will reuse them.

ERIC: Yep, so we're collecting them here at the Museum of Science. If you come by and you drop your used eclipse glasses off at the Information Desk right in the main lobby, we have a collection bucket and we're going to be sending them off to one of those organizations. If you're not nearby the museum, or you're not planning a trip sometime soon, just call your local library, call a science museum near you. There's lots of places that are just not on that list of acceptable places to donate them because those lists are growing by dozens every day, because there's this big effort right now. So just find a place near you where you can do that because it's awesome to think of those eclipse glasses, instead of ending up in a landfill, letting someone else observe the sun in another part of the world far away from you.

TALIA: And the cardboard frames are recyclable. So you can punch the lenses out and recycle the cardboard frame so that they will not end up in a landfill. So there are multiple options which will be of benefit to you, benefit to other people, and don't involve filling up landfills with perfectly good usable eclipse glasses.

ERIC: Alright Talia, thanks so much for chatting with me about using and reusing eclipse glasses.

TALIA: I hope everybody will make the effort to keep them or donate them. If not, do recycle those frames.

ERIC: For more details on upcoming eclipses that you can see from Boston or wherever you live in the world, visit mos.org/eclipse. And be sure to sign up for Talia's Spacing Out newsletter to be notified of any particularly good sunspot outbreaks. Until next time, keep asking questions.

If you liked this episode, be sure to check out:

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