00:00Did you know you can turn a regular pair of binoculars into a solar projector to safely
00:05observe sunspots and partial solar eclipses? Hi, I'm Dr. Ryan French. I'm teaming up with
00:10Space.com to give you some tips on how to view the upcoming eclipse. So just to be clear, you
00:15should never look directly at the sun with the naked eye and you certainly should never look at
00:20the sun through a regular pair of binoculars. But in this video, I'm going to show you how I can
00:25use
00:25a regular pair of binoculars not to look through, but to turn it into a projector to safely observe
00:31the sun. You will need a tripod, two pieces of cardboard, a pair of scissors and a pen, some way
00:37to attach your binoculars to your tripod. Some duct tape or some cable ties will do the job. You need
00:42something to lean your cardboard up against. I have an old sort of desktop laptop stand, but this isn't
00:47needed. You could really use anything. So the first thing you want to do is cut a binocular shaped hole,
00:52put your binoculars inside of your cardboard. So you're left with something like this. People might
00:57be tempted to look through, which absolutely you should not do. So I think safety first,
01:02what you want to do is just take a pen. So you're left with something that looks like this.
01:05Your next step is to simply attach your binoculars with the piece of cardboard to the top of your
01:10tripod. At which point you have something that looks like this. The next thing to do very simply is
01:16to point this up at the sun. You can actually already see a couple of bright circles here on the
01:20ground.
01:21That's a hint that I'm doing something correctly, but to do this properly, let's get my second piece
01:24of cardboard and my laptop stand here. And then we're going to place these directly underneath
01:29the shadow of the binoculars. If you can't see two white circles at this point, you might need to
01:34adjust some things. And when you see two white circles, you're almost done. Now, if these don't
01:38look circular to you, if they look kind of oblong shaped, then this is an indication that you need to
01:43reposition the angle of your piece of cardboard on the floor. Now, the final thing to do is to bring
01:48your
01:48two circles into focus. So I'm simply going to do this by turning the focus wheel on my binoculars,
01:54and I'm going to do this until I have a nice sharp image. And essentially, that's all there is to
01:58it.
01:58I currently have two images of the sun. If there was an eclipse, you would see the eclipped sun
02:03through this view. But you can even see as I'm recording this, there is a sunspot region visible
02:08on the sun that you can actually see in both of these images side by side. One final thing to
02:13consider
02:13is the size of the sun on your image will vary depending on the distance between your binoculars
02:20to this piece of cardboard. So if you want to increase the size of the sun, you just simply
02:24need to prop up your tripod to be taller and reposition from there. However, as I've said before,
02:29you cannot look directly through these binoculars. So if you have children around, it's my recommendation
02:34not to have these at a height they can readily look through. So that might mean bringing this all the
02:39way to the ground or bring it all the way to the top so they can't look through directly.
02:44So there we go. I hope this information was useful for you, learning how to turn a regular pair of
02:48binoculars into a solar projector to observe sunspots and the upcoming solar eclipse.
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