In this activity students will learn several ways to safely observe a solar eclipse.

This lesson is taken from NASA's Phytopia: Discovery of the Marine Ecosystem written in partnership with Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Science with funding from the National Science Foundation.

In this activity, students will model  the geometry of solar eclipses by plotting a few points on a piece of graph paper, and using quarters and a nickel to represent the Sun and Moon (not to scale). 

In this activity, students will compare the methods scientists use to study the Sun, including drawings made during a total solar eclipse in the 1860’s, modern coronagraphs, and advanced imagery gathered by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory.