At Glendale Community College, hundreds watched the solar eclipse
About 500 people gathered at Glendale Community College’s planetarium Monday to watch the Great American Eclipse — twice the number of attendees than college officials said they were expecting.
Event organizer and planetarium technician Barbara Falkowski said the college anticipated about 250 people would attend the viewing and only ordered that number of NASA eclipse glasses, which were provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“The media blew it up. We had an estimate, but people kept wandering in,” Falkowski said during an interview at the event. “But I’m grateful to the community because everyone has been kind and generous, helping each other out with glasses.”
She added that people began arriving at 7 a.m., gathering on the planetarium’s top deck and ground floor. Inside the packed planetarium, attendees watched NASA’s live stream of the eclipse.
The lack of enough viewing glasses and disorganization were the main complaints from attendees, but many said the event brought about a sense of camaraderie and community.
“A few people are upset about the disorganization, but we don’t do this everyday. We expected a smaller crowd,” said Sevada Chamras, division chair of physical sciences at the college.
Empty cereal and Amazon boxes were used to create viewing glasses, while others, such as Huntington Beach resident Stan Silverstein, enrolled in an extension class at UC Irvine months in advance to learn about the eclipse and create special binoculars to watch it.
Others projected the eclipse through a pair of binoculars onto paper to take pictures of it or used sunspotters. One student held a board with a pin hole to project the eclipse onto the ground.
North Hollywood resident Erika Menendez, 24, and her mother chose to watch the solar eclipse at the college because they thought it would “draw less of a crowd” compared to other places such as the Griffith Observatory.
They arrived by 8:30 a.m. and snagged two seats at the top deck of the planetarium.
Menendez said they had never seen an eclipse and were encouraged to attend a viewing after hearing commercials on television and reading articles online.
“It was a mess this morning because people didn’t know we had to get in line for sunglasses, but overall we’ve been enjoying it — it’s all been worth it,” Menendez said.
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