[masraum]

The American Astronomical Society has put out a warning to be careful about what you buy because there are some unscrupulous folks selling stuff that they put the ISO certification on and even have bogus test results on their website when their stuff isn't actually safe or at least, is not actually certified.

AAS's Advice for Safe Solar-Eclipse Viewing - Sky & Telescope

I just bought some

I sprung for these because I've always wanted to view the sun sunspots and that sort of thing. I guess I wish we had tried to schedule a trip to someplace that will have totality, but it's not really in the cards for this year. Besides, how much more fun would it be to do a farther trip to someplace more interesting in some future eclipse.

It's interesting, I remember hearing when I was younger "don't look at a solar eclipse because it's more dangerous than looking at the sun and the corona is brighter" or something like that. I remember when I was told that thinking, "WTH are they talking about. When you look at the sun, you see the sun AND the corona so how could the corona minus the sun actually be worse?" I see now that has changed and it's now perfectly safe to look at the fully eclipsed sun as long as you don't do it until it is completely eclipsed. I'm sure the warning before was probably more about keeping folks from looking at it just before and just after when it is still dangerous.