So two days from now half of North America is going to stand in a parking lot and stare at the sun, and I want to talk about the one part of this whole eclipse thing that's actually a mess: the glasses.
I ordered mine off Amazon back in March like a normal person, because who has time to drive to a science museum gift shop. $12.99 for a ten-pack, prime shipping, whatever, done. Then last week I actually read a headline instead of scrolling past it and found out the American Astronomical Society has been warning for weeks that a huge chunk of the "eclipse glasses" flooding Amazon and random gas stations aren't actually safe. Not slightly-less-good. Actually dangerous, as in they can let through enough solar radiation to damage your retina and you won't feel it happening because your eyes don't have pain receptors for that. Great.
Amazon apparently pulled some listings and has been quietly refunding people who bought certain brands, but the site is such a churn of third-party sellers and relisted knockoffs that pulling one listing does basically nothing. A seller gets banned, a new storefront pops up Tuesday with the same stock photo. I don't think this is even Amazon being careless exactly, it's just that the marketplace model makes this whack-a-mole and always has.
So here's the actual check, since half the "how to spot fake eclipse glasses" posts going around are useless.
Real solar viewers are certified to the ISO 12312-2 international safety standard. That number needs to be printed right on the glasses, not just claimed somewhere in the Amazon listing text (sellers can type "ISO certified" in a product description with zero verification happening, obviously). Look for the actual ISO number and ideally a manufacturer name you can trace.
The dumb-but-effective home test: put them on inside your house with the lights on. If you can see anything at all besides maybe an extremely faint LED filament, they're junk. Real eclipse glasses are dark enough that you should barely be able to tell the lights are on. I tried mine over the kitchen table Tuesday night and could see the whole room clearly through them, which, yeah. Straight in the trash.
The American Astronomical Society keeps an actual list of vendors they've verified sell legitimate glasses, sourced from a small number of manufacturers everyone in the field actually trusts (American Paper Optics is one of the big ones people keep pointing to). If you're going to buy last-minute Sunday or Monday, buy from one of those instead of whatever has the most stars on Amazon, because star ratings on a $6 item are worthless as a safety signal, people leave five stars because shipping was fast.
If you genuinely can't get real ones by Monday, the pinhole projector trick still works and costs nothing: poke a small hole in an index card, hold it up, look at the projected image on the ground or another card, not at the sun. It's not as fun as actually looking up but it won't send you to an ophthalmologist.
Slightly unrelated but stuck in my head this week: Tesla reported Q1 deliveries Tuesday and it was ugly, 386,810 vehicles, down from 484,507 last quarter and the first year-over-year drop in ages. Everyone's got a theory (price cuts not working, aging lineup, whatever), and I don't have a hot take beyond noting that a company built entirely on a growth story doesn't have a lot of room to just have a bad quarter without the narrative shifting fast.
Anyway. Monday's the day. If you're anywhere in the path of totality — I've got family in a town in Ohio that's suddenly the most popular place on earth for six minutes — do yourself a favor and check your glasses against a lamp before you're standing outside with everyone looking up at the same time. It takes ten seconds and it's the difference between a cool afternoon and a genuinely bad decision you can't undo. I'll probably post again after, assuming totality doesn't melt my phone camera trying to get a picture of it.