May 20, 2012 was a day for which I'd been waiting for more than 2 years. I had never seen a solar eclipse before, and this one would be visible from right where I lived - who could ask for anything better than that? I didn't worry about how to view the eclipse until the day before the event. Up until then, I thought I could view it through a telescope with a solar filter, or maybe with a pair of eclipse glasses - but on the night before the event I still had nothing, and it was too late to get anything shipped from Amazon on time. I had to come up with another plan. I knew I'd definitely be able to view it with a pinhole projector (a fancy name for a board with a tiny hole in it), but I knew from experience the image of the sun would be either small or faint. I wanted something better. I couldn't use my dad's telescope to project the image; the first time I tried that, I ended up melting the lens from the powerful focused rays. I started thinking of how I could use