This blog post contains pictures of how we viewed the August 21,2017 solar eclipse in central Texas. We didn't get our solar viewing glasses soon enough (even though we had a pair that my husband was given at a conference a few days before but he didn't realize it) so we had to improvise. We tried the cereal box eclipse viewer and that worked really well with just a regular cereal box. We tried different box sizes and configurations without achieving much improvement over the original. More appealing views were formed by putting pieces of white copy paper and a piece of white poster board on the ground and focusing the sunlight through a few different kinds of apertures.

When there is not an eclipse, sunlight focused through a hole in paper will project a circle on the targeted "screen". When there is an eclipse, sunlight focused through a hole will project a crescent shape on the screen.

Apertures formed by poking a pin through a sheet of copy paper:

An aperture formed by holding a hand in a shadow-puppet bunny configuration:

Apertures formed by a silicone gravy-separator strainer with 3 mm holes (colanders didn't work so well):

Tree shadows on poster board:

More tree shadows on poster board: