Griffith Observatory

Author's Comments

The observatory earns its reputation and then some, but the photograph everyone means to make is not the one they usually leave with. The trick is blue hour, and the trick within the trick is patience. You want the moment when the sodium lights of the basin have come up but the sky still holds a band of cobalt above the Pacific, and that window is maybe twenty minutes long. Arrive an hour early. Claim your spot on the west terrace if the Hollywood Sign is what you are after, or the front lawn if you want downtown rising through the middle distance. Winter is the season. A day or two after rain is the day. The basin clears out, the haze that usually softens the middle distance simply is not there, and the view runs impossibly far - snow on Baldy to the east, Catalina floating off the coast to the southwest, the grid of the city laid out between them in a way that finally makes geographic sense. I have stood on that terrace in January watching the domes go copper against a sky the color of a bruise and understood, briefly, why people move here. The crowds are real. So is the parking situation. Take the bus or walk up from the Greek, and treat the last light before blue hour as the price of admission rather than the show itself. The building will be swarmed. Work the architecture anyway. The Art Deco lines against a darkening sky are worth the elbows, and once true blue hour arrives most of the phone photographers will have already turned around and started back down the hill.

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