Observatory
Started: 2024-04-14 20:09:01
Submitted: 2024-04-14 21:17:10
Visibility: World-readable
An afternoon at the Griffith Observatory
By the time we finished our Warner Bros studio tour, it was time for lunch. I parked at a garage in downtown Burbank with an EV charger, though the rate of charge was underwhelming. The best I could get, without going far out of my way, was a 6 kW slow charge. We spent an hour eating lunch, at Ike's Love and Sandwiches on one of the two tiny blocks that look like what passes for a downtown in Burbank, bringing the charge up to 25%.
I drove down the 5 past Glendale into Los Feliz (the only time I actually drove on a freeway in my 48 hours on the ground in Los Angeles), then turned into Griffith Park. By the time we got to West Observatory Road it was blocked off, with traffic directed to park along Western Canyon Road. I found a parallel parking not far below the junction and attempted to pay for parking at the nearest kiosk, but every kiosk I tried was powered off, or showing the message "out of order", or showing a darkened screen that would only beep in apparent error when I pressed any buttons. I checked every kiosk I encountered on the walk up to the Griffith Observatory and found every single one broken. I hoped this would at least show good-faith effort to pay for parking.
It was warm and sunny when we parked, so I left my light jacket in the car, but by the time we climbed to the observatory the breeze had picked up and the air was distinctly chilly. I pointed out the Hollywood sign nestled in the hills, but I wasn't clear that the kids understood this to be an important cultural symbol.
We stepped inside the Griffith Observatory into a crowded gallery looking at a large Foucault pendulum. The pendulum had a series of pegs set under it, most of which had been knocked down as the pendulum moved with the rotation of the Earth (or, rather, stayed fixed in its original plane while the Earth rotated under it).
We looked at a camera obscura, projecting an image from outside the observatory onto a table in a darkened room, then walked past a Tesla coil in a Faraday cage (which gave me the opportunity to talk about the EM spectrum, specifically the description of microwaves as "waves you can hold in your hand", and the sort of waves that could pass through a Faraday cage). This turned out to segue directly into the displays in the next gallery, talking about astronomical observations using the entire EM spectrum. Each part of the spectrum had a display talking about how we experience it, and what we can observe in the sky. The infrared section had an IR inspection camera facing down at us, giving us the chance to see ourselves in IR. Here I learned that my glasses are opaque to IR, while remaining transparent to visible light.
One alcove held a series of displays about astronomy in California, sponsored by the state of California in a bit of self-promotion. There was a large model of the 200-inch Hale Telescope at Caltech's Palomar Observatory near San Diego that was motorized to allow visitors to aim the telescope and move the dome around it. I had trouble getting the exhibit to work but Julian had some luck with it.
The other reason we came to the observatory was to look out at the views of the Los Angeles basin below us. Downtown Los Angeles was clearly visible a few miles away, its flat-roofed skyscrapers confined to a small region amid the low-rise sprawl. "It's an ocean of city," Calvin said when he looked out at the suburban sprawl stretching all the way to Santa Monica and the ocean.
I stood in line waiting to get tickets to the next planetarium show until someone mentioned that there was a kiosk around the corner that I could use instead. This seemed like a better idea than waiting in the long, slow-moving line, so I went in search of the kiosk and eventually found it tucked away on the wall of a side corridor near the Foucault pendulum; I walked by it several times until I realized it was what I was looking for. I got tickets for the show Signs of Life, and we waited outside in line to attend the show. It spent much of its 35-minute runtime projecting video onto the massive domed planetarium screen above our heads as we laid back in reclining theater chairs with a view of the dome. In the second half of the show the insectoid planetarium projector emerged from its spot in the middle of the room and projected its representation of the night sky onto the dome, complete with drawings of the constellations and highlighted by the live narrator's laser pointer.
After the show we departed the observatory (having hopefully learned something in the process), and headed back down the road to the car.
For supper we walked down the street from our hotel on Vine in Hollywood to a vegan Mexican place called Doomies NextMex. I had a vegan Korean BBQ taco, which was amazing. Julian was not impressed by the vegan cheese in his burrito, because it was too much like melted cheese and he doesn't like melted cheese on anything. I got him a bowl of refried beans and tortillas, which was good enough. We returned to the hotel to retire for the night, in the awkward way where multiple people want to go to bed at different times and it doesn't quite work for anyone.
I took a few more pictures at Griffith Observatory at Photos on 2024-04-05.
