Greg's Corner

Beware of fake eclipse glasses online

On August 21st of this year, a narrow path through the United States will be able to view a complete solar eclipse for roughly 3 minutes. That’s not even taking into account any weather disruptions that may occur along the eclipse’s path. With such a small window of opportunity to view a possibly once in a lifetime event you might think scammers wouldn’t bother with such a small potential pool of victims, yet they are.

As we all should know, you can’t view a solar eclipse with the naked eye without sustaining severe optical damage. In order to view the eclipse, you would need a pair of eclipse glasses that have special filters. Luckily, eclipse glasses are relatively inexpensive. However, this hasn’t stopped the market from being flooded with cheap imitations and knock offs that could potentially damage your eyes. NASA states legitimate glasses should be designated ISO 12312-2 and should be labeled as such. According to a local news report from a city that’s near the eclipse’s path, if your glasses were made in the U.S., you should be ok.

What you should probably not do is buy them online, unless they’re from a reputable vendor. A number of ads for eclipse glasses on certain disreputable websites carry little to no information about the glasses they’re selling. The actual glasses are cheap enough and are plentiful enough from legitimate sources that you don’t have to worry about dealing with fakes.