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Of Course Pizza Hut Found a Way to Turn Its Boxes Into Solar Eclipse Viewers

Amazon’s eclipse glasses are highway robbery ($350 plus $4.99 shipping!). If you want to experience Monday’s eclipse on the cheap, all you need is an appetite for pizza: Behold this device Pizza Hut has MacGyvered from a leftover box to keep you from destroying your retinas, which really, please, don’t do.

All it takes is scissors, a sheet of paper, some foil, a pointy object, a little Scotch tape, and a pizza box prominently bearing the brand’s name:

To clarify, these instructions yield one projector, not a set of glasses. That means you can’t look directly at the eclipse with this thingy — you’re creating a pinhole projector that reflects the sun onto a screen. To make it, you cut the pizza box in half, put a one-inch round hole in the top piece, and tape a piece of foil over the hole. Then poke a small pinhole in the foil, and tape the paper to the bottom piece of the box to provide a nice bright display area. When it finally happens and the sun gets blocked, put your back to the sun, hold the piece with the pinhole up in front of the piece with the paper, and the sun’s light will project through and make a cool eclipse shape on the sheet.

As it happens, NASA has a tutorial explaining how you can make a projector using any two pieces of cardboard. But no one will fault you for going the extra mile with this version and having pizza for the wait.

Of Course Pizza Hut Turned Its Box Into an Eclipse Viewer