#CulturedPeachy #NewYorkStatePeachy #PeachyinSpace George Eastman Museum presents “Focus, Click, Totality!” to celebrate 2024 total solar eclipse
The George Eastman Museum will be open on Monday, April 8 in celebration of the 2024 total solar eclipse. Titled “Focus, Click, Totality!”, this special event will run from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and will showcase the historic gardens and grounds as a viewing area for this once-in-a-lifetime celestial event.
Visitors will have the opportunity to view a display of pinhole cameras from the museum’s extensive collection and a selection of eclipse-related works in the Collection Gallery. Visitors of all ages can walk into a camera with a mobile camera obscura on the grounds, and make their own pinhole projector, as well as cyanotypes and phenakistoscopes in the museum’s Discovery Room. Musician Maggie Paxson, who delighted patrons with a sing-along event last fall, will perform moon-themed songs on the East Lawn prior to the eclipse, and the museum’s resident organist Joe Blackburn will perform space-themed music on George Eastman’s original Aeolian pipe organ.
Visitors can track the progress of the eclipse through a live NASA feed prior to joining others in the museum’s Library Garden and East Lawn, two picture-perfect locations to view the solar eclipse in its totality phase at 3:20 p.m. for an impressive three minutes and thirty-eight seconds. At 4 p.m., the Dryden Theatre will screen the 1986 classic Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, directed by Leonard Nimoy and starring Nimoy and William Shattner.
The George Eastman Museum will also be open during regular hours the weekend prior to the total solar eclipse, with celestial and technology displays in the Collections Gallery and activities in the Discovery Room. On Saturday, April 6, there will be a 7:30 p.m. screening of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1949), where an eclipse features prominently in the film. Visit www.eastman.org/dryden-theatre for more information.
Admission to Focus, Click, Totality! is $35 for adults, $20 for youth 5-18, and free for children four and under. Admission includes admission to the museum, access to the viewing area in the garden, eclipse glasses, and the film screening. Admission does not include parking or the workshop. Side street parking is extremely limited with an array of eclipse activities also planned at the Rochester Museum and Science Center and the Memorial Art Gallery. A limited number of parking spaces are available at the museum for those who purchase a $100 parking pass (not including admission). Park at GEM and explore all of the other festivities within walk distance.
In addition, The George Eastman Museum is partnering with First Student to provide free shuttle busses to allow visitors to shuttle around Rochester. The bus will travel in a continuous loop between the South Avenue and East End garages, the Eastman Museum, The Strong Museum, the Memorial Art Gallery, and the Rochester Museum & Science Center April 6-8, with service extended to the Rochester Public Market on Monday, April 8. For more information and to register for Focus, Click, Totality!, visit www.eastman.org/eclipse.
About the George Eastman Museum
Founded in 1947, the George Eastman Museum is the world’s oldest photography museum and one of the largest film archives in the United States, located on the historic Rochester estate of entrepreneur and philanthropist George Eastman, the pioneer of popular photography. Its holdings comprise more than 400,000 photographs, 41,000 motion picture films, the world’s preeminent collection of photographic and cinematographic technology, one of the leading libraries of books related to photography and cinema, and extensive holdings of documents and other objects related to George Eastman. As a research and teaching institution, the Eastman Museum has an active publishing program and its L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation’s graduate program (a collaboration with the University of Rochester) makes critical contributions to film preservation. For more information, visit eastman.org and follow the George Eastman Museum account on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
