With tomorrow evening’s partial eclipse hours away, certified glasses have vanished from shelves nationwide. We checked five shops around Boortmeerbeek and Zemst and found none. So we built a live page where anyone can report what their local shop still has — and what to do if you find nothing.
Belgium sees the largest solar eclipse since 1999 tomorrow evening, and the country has run out of the one thing needed to watch it safely.
In Brussels the Moon starts crossing the sun at about 19:18. The eclipse peaks roughly an hour later, around 20:20, with close to 90% of the sun covered, and ends at about 21:05. The sun will be low in the west-north-west, so an unobstructed view in that direction matters as much as the weather.
We went looking. MediaMarkt, Carrefour, OKay and Pearle in Boortmeerbeek: nothing. The Carrefour hypermarket in Zemst: nothing. Volkssterrenwacht MIRA in Grimbergen has been sold out for a week, and Vilvoptique in Vilvoorde is taking pickup reservations for a delivery it hopes arrives on the day itself.
Stock that does exist is moving hour by hour, which no article can keep up with. So we made a live one:
Where to still find eclipse glasses in Belgium →
It lists every shop we and our readers know about, sorted by province or by what is nearest you, in Dutch, French, English and German. Marking a shop in stock or sold out takes two taps and no account. If you walk past an optician today, tell everyone else what you saw.
Be careful what you buy. Only filters marked ISO 12312-2 are safe, and the code belongs on the glasses themselves, not just the packaging — counterfeits are circulating. Resellers on Facebook Marketplace and in local groups are asking three to ten times the shop price of around €3.
If you find none — and most people won't. Do not improvise. Sunglasses, smoked glass, a CD or exposed film are not filters, and a partial eclipse has no safe moment to look unaided. An ordinary welding mask is not a substitute either: only a welding filter of shade 14 or darker blocks enough ultraviolet and infrared, and the shade 10 to 12 sold in hardware shops does not.
The safe option costs nothing. Pinhole projection: two sheets of paper and a pin, standing with your back to the sun. A kitchen colander works too, and so does any leafy tree — the gaps between the leaves will scatter dozens of little crescents across the pavement.
The tracker closes on 13 August.
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