Get your welding helmets ready

By Gemma Deavin ·  4 min read

In roughly 14 hours the moon will pass between us and the sun, casting a shadow over a small part of the earth.

Lucky for Western Queensland, and Northern Australia in general, that includes us!

We’re ready in Longreach, with five welding helmets on call. It’s not Cairns, where the viewing will be optimal and people are gathering from all over the world, but we will still get 83% coverage. Charleville, further south, is expecting 78%.

An eclipse is not a foreign concept but I’ve never stopped to give the phenomenon proper thought before. The mind boggles when you consider the physics of it all.

The sun is so much bigger than the moon, so how do they appear the same size? As you would expect, it’s a numbers game. The moon, which is 400 times smaller than the sun is also 400 times closer to earth. Voila!

This is the first total eclipse visible in Australia since 2002, which happened in Ceduna. Apparently the first in Northern Australia occurred in 710AD and the next will take place in 2237! They occur somewhere on earth every 18 months.

But back to business.

All this talk, but how do you actually view an eclipse?

The first thing to know, and remember, is to never look at an eclipse with the naked eye or any optical device like a pair of binoculars of a telescope. If you look at the sun your eye-lens will concentrate the sun’s light and focus it to a very small spot on the back of your retina. This can cause permanent eye damage or blindness.

Pinhole projector

The simplest pinhole projector requires only a long box or tube, a piece of aluminium foil, a pin and a sheet of white paper.

The longer the box, the bigger the pinhole image. For a box that is one metre long, the image will be 0.0093 metres (9.3mm) in diameter. So, the size of the image is about 1/100th the length of the box.

To make a pinhole projector:

  1. Cut a hole in the centre of one end of the box.
  2. Tape a piece of foil over the hole.
  3. Poke a small hole in the foil with a pin
  4. Cut a viewing hole in the side of the box
  5. Put a piece of white paper inside the end of the box near the viewing portal
  6. Point the end of the box with the pinhole at the sun so that you see a round image on the paper at the other end. 
  7. Don’t look through the pinhole at the sun. Only look at the image on the paper.


A simpler viewing option is to get two pieces of cardboard; one normal piece, and one with a pinhold. Hold the pinhole piece as far away from the other one (on top) as possible. The further it is, the bigger the image of the eclipse on the bottom sheet.


You can use your own hands. Hold up both hands with your fingers overlapping at right angles over some clear ground or a white piece of cardboard. The holes in between make pinholes.


If there are some trees, try looking at the images of the sun coming through the holes formed by the leaves. A piece of white cardboard is all you may need to have a great viewing session!

Optical projection

Another projection method is using binoculars. But don’t look through them!

To do this:

  1. First, you should fix the binoculars to a tripod. Duct tape?!
  2. Put a sheet of cardboard in front of the binoculars, with the lenses sticking through holes you cut for them.
  3. Cover one of the lenses with tape or paper. You only need one.
  4. Point binoculars towards the sun and hold a piece of white cardboard about 40 cm behind the eyepiece.
  5. If you focus on the sun you will find the sun comes out as a sharp image.
  6. Beware of the eye piece. It can get HOT!


If you do feel like you have look directly at the sun, be SURE you have the correct filter.

Noneffective filters are sunglasses, polaroid filters, smoked glass, exposed colour film, x-ray film, photographic neutral density filters.

You CAN use special glasses.

You can also use welders glasses and helmets with number 14 quality and above. You can get these from a welding supplier store. Or, as in our case, ask the lovely men at the local men's shed very nicely for a loan!

We're going with that option here.

However you see it, happy viewing! In Longreach a group of ABC Open contributors, keen photographers and amateur astronomers are gathering at the Thomson River bridge at 5.30am. One of them will be David Freeman who write this great blog on which camera settings to use for the eclipse.

Cairns’ eclipse will begin at 5.45am and reach it’s ‘pinnacle’ at 6.38am, lasting for two minutes!

Enjoy! I can’t wait for an excuse to wear a welding helmet around in public all morning.

(ABC Western Queensland will be covering the eclipse on the morning, as well as providing updates on our website and the ABC Western Queensland’s facebook page.)

Published 13 Nov 2012.  Longreach QLD 4730

Gemma Deavin

Previous Open Producer

Cairns QLD 4870


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