Bring some cash. I suspect most of the eclipse glasses sold went to locals who plan to make a killing in the inflated cardboard glasses market on Monday before they go back to being worth half a nickel again on Tuesday.
I will actually be surprised if every single intersection in the path of totality Monday morning doesn’t have at least one pickup truck or van filled with boxes of overpriced eclipse glasses for sale.
Good thing you aren’t going to St. Louis. The reports for several days have been that no one can find glasses anymore. Checking on Craigslist, I see one person selling lots of 25 for $80, another selling 5 for $20, and a handful of individual pairs for $10-$15 each.
I’m not enough of a capitalist, I guess. I gave glasses away to anyone at the gym that wanted them.
The glasses I ordered over a month ago from Amazon were recalled and, like you, I’m having no luck at all finding any replacements. While I appreciate the refund, I really wish Amazon had at least sent out the cardboard eclipse glasses to replace them.
If your glasses were (purportedly) made by American Paper Optics, this page has photos showing the difference between the legitimate ones and the fakes.
The eclipse glasses my family bought from Amazon were recalled. Sunday, my husband went in search of glasses locally. He went from store to store and finally found some at a Walmart Marketplace, which is a Walmart grocery store and smaller than a big Walmart. There were about twenty pair of American Paper Optics glasses there.
Check with your local library, too.
One of our local libraries is doing an eclipse event (the main branch in downtown Akron) but you have to be at their event to use their glasses.
I put my glasses on and “tested” them by staring at different light sources to see how they look. I read that I should be able to see the flashlight/flash on my phone - which I was - and naked bulbs - which I can.
I couldn’t see the light coming through my window, or my phone on its brightest setting.
However, my glasses don’t even purport to be up to ISO-whatever standards, just CE standards.
So, I guess I’ll just stare at the ground and catch photos and videos later. Shame, because my area is one of the few that doesn’t expect to have cloud cover.
Oh! Yes, I will call my optometrist’s office this week and see what they’ve got. I have to call them anyway to schedule an appt.
Thanks all for the help and yes please feel free to keep discussing.
I can’t see shit through the 11 filter from the welding helmet.
You can make a pinhole projector or camera to experience the eclipse, too. Protect your eyes!
I bought two different sets and only got the message for one of them (which I was already skeptical of). The other is on all of the approved lists, etc., and they haven’t said anything about them.
Here’s one quote (there are many more):
I got some Amazon glasses too, and today I said fuck this shit and hit a local welding supply store. Place is a total hole in the wall, the kind of place that welders go but nobody else ever would. They don’t usually stock #14 plates for goggles but a year ago the proprietor of this place got real smart and ordered a fuckton of the plates and the goggles (that normally have #5 glass in them, you pop that out and replace with the 14) and I picked up two plates for three bucks each. I damned well know they’re fine and I’m not risking my vision on some bullshit Chinese crap glasses. Suckers got the ISO and ANSI certification numbers right on 'em.
If you’re in the Portland metro area, it’s Jones Welding on NE 112th and Sandy.
If you run through the math, you get this:
Shade #11: T = 0.0001931
Shade #14: T = 0.00001
IOW, shade 11 lets in twenty times more light/heat than is considered safe for looking at the sun. So you’ll still want to supplement your shade 11 lens with something else that has a transmittance of just 5 percent, which corresponds to a shade number of about 5.4. Goggles typically used for oxyacetylene are shade 5, so if you use both of those items together, you’ll hit a shade number of about 13.7, probably good enough.
Thanks, Elf.
Last night a local station did a report on eclipse glasses, and one 711 had a shipment of 600 pairs of glasses at 4 PM and were sold out by 10 PM. And that 711 is very rural. (And a couple of miles from my house.)
Could you check your math on this? If I understand the formula, I’m getting:
T = 10[1]
S=11 —> T = 5.2 x 10^-5
S=14 —> T = 2.7 x 10^-6
Different values, but in agreement with a factor of about 20 between the two.
But by my reckoning shade 4 with shade 11 is exactly equivalent to shade 14, because if transmittance multiplies, you just add the (1-S) terms in the exponent, and
(1-4) + (1-11) = (1-14)
3/7 (1-S) ↩︎
ETA: Obviously, please don’t rely on my math until Machine Elf has checked — normally I trust his math better than mine, and maybe I’ve misunderstood the formula, and I know nothing about this. Obviously we should make sure we get this right.
:smack: :smack: :smack:
I used the second formula at my link (SN = …), and it looks like I put the 1 inside the parentheses instead of outside. Pure luck that my mistake gave an answer that was safer rather than more dangerous. :eek:
Having fixed my mistake, I can confirm that you did your math right: a shade 11 lens stacked with a shade 4 lens is equivalent to a shade 14 lens (which sounds nonsensical in a 1+1=3 way, but it’s true). Thanks for double-checking.
Thanks - so the bottom line is if you stack two on top of each other, the effective shade number is the sum of the two minus 1. I think I’m going to my local welding supply store to see what I can find. No doubt they are sold out of 14, but it might well be possible to find a combination that works, and I think I trust that more than the glasses I got from Amazon at this point.
You can still get (not-counterfeit) ones at brick & mortar retailers. I got mine at Walmart. Lowes and Toys R Us are also selling them. Mine cost a dollar.