With eclipse glasses in short supply ahead of Wednesday's partial solar eclipse over the UK, experts are advising several safe household alternatives to viewing the Sun directly. The Royal Astronomical Society warns against improvising with sunglasses or dark goggles, which do not block enough UV light and can cause serious eye damage, and instead recommends simple projection methods that let people watch the event safely from home.

Suggested techniques include a pinhole projector made from a piece of card and paper, holding a kitchen colander up to the Sun to cast multiple projected images at once, and building a pinhole viewer from a cereal box, foil and paper for a clearer image. Nasa also cautions against filming the eclipse on a mobile phone, as doing so without a special solar filter risks damaging the phone's camera sensor as well as the viewer's eyes. The event will be the UK's most significant eclipse since 1999, though only a partial eclipse will be visible here, unlike the total eclipse seen in parts of Spain, Greenland and Iceland.