Excitement surrounding the 2024 solar eclipse is building around Cleveland due to the region’s location along the path of totality, which means residents and visitors will experience several minutes of darkness when the moon completely blocks out the sun’s light. As the home of the NASA Glenn Visitor Center, and the prime downtown destination for viewing the eclipse in 2024, we have a lot of anticipation for the big event so we decided to kick off the countdown a year early!

Join the Science Center and our partners from NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland for two days of eclipse countdown excitement and hands-on activities including:

Camera Obscura Activity – Explore the physics of light and vision by making your own pinhole camera, and walk inside a giant version!

Shadow Imagery – Investigate safe ways of viewing the sun and solar eclipses using shadows.

Liftoff: Math in Space Science Show – 3, 2, 1, blast off! Explore the stages of human flight outside Earth’s orbit and the mathematics that make it possible.

Virtual Guest Speaker Dr. Kelly Korreck, NASA Program Manager – Dr. Korreck knows how to handle the heat! She built and operated instruments to study the sun and understand its hot, explosive outer atmosphere, or corona, and she is NASA’s program manager for the 2024 eclipse. She will join us virtually at 2 p.m. on both Friday and Saturday to discuss the eclipse and her work on the Parker Solar Probe.

NASA demonstration on the unique proportions of size and distance between the sun, Earth and moon that make a total solar eclipse possible.