Safely Watch Solar Eclipse in L.A.

Want to watch the annular solar eclipse this evening? Make sure you protect your eyes—looking directly at the sun during an eclipse can cause permanent eye damage or even blindness, according to NASA.

The sun will appear as a thin ring behind the moon, creating what is known as a "ring of fire."

"For the May eclipse, the moon will be at the farthest distance from Earth that it ever achieves—meaning that it will block the smallest possible portion of the sun, and leave the largest possible bright ring around the outside," NASA said on its website, according to CNN.com.

If you want to look directly at the eclipse, use eclipse viewing glasses, which are generally made out of aluminized mylar, according to an article written by Fred Espenak on NASA's eclipse website. Welder's glass No. 14 or darker will also protect eyes; however, color film, certain types of developed black and white film, medical x-ray films with images, smoked glass, photographic neutral density filters and polarizing filters will not.

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Additionally, filters that screw onto the eyepiece of a telescope are dangerous because the concentration of infrared wavelengths at that point can crack from overheating, Espenak writes.

Though the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles (as well as planetariums across the country) has sold out of eclipse viewing glasses, there are other, indirect ways to safety watch the eclipse, according to Espenak.

"The safest and most inexpensive (method) is … projection, in which a pinhole or small opening is used to cast the image of the sun on a screen placed a half-meter or more beyond the opening," Espenak writes. "Projected images of the sun may even be seen on the ground in the small openings created by interlacing fingers, or in the dappled sunlight beneath a leafy tree."

To find out how to build a pinhole projector, as well as other methods of viewing the eclipse, check out the instructions on Exploratorium.

Griffith Observatory will also have extra free telescopes and binoculars with special filters available at its eclipse-viewing event Sunday evening.

According to the Huffington Post Los Angeles, the eclipse will begin at 5:24 p.m. and will be at its height at 6:38 p.m. The eclipse will end at 7:42 p.m., only 10 minutes before sunset. The website also reports that "the moon will eclipse 86 percent of the sun's diameter, which will be the most 'extensive' eclipse the city has seen since 1992."

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