We went for a drive up to Griffith Park, which is a large area of parkland in the hills north of Hollywood. There are some LA icons in Griffith Park - the Hollywood sign, the Griffith Observatory, LA Zoo, the Greek Theatre and the Autry Museum. It had rained on the Friday night and as a result the air in LA was the clearest we'd ever seen! Driving up the 101 freeway towards the city we had an amazing view of the LA city centre.

We drove through Hollywood to Hollywoodland - the subdivision which the sign overlooks, and which the sign was originally built to advertise (yes, a realestate advert!). We parked and took photos of the sign, and then joined the Hollywood traffic chaos and headed into Griffith Park and went and looked at the view of the city - which everyone else was doing too, and so we went on to the Griffith Observatory Satellite facility - the real Observatory is currently being renovated.

The moon was up and there was a telescope outside the facility pointed at the moon, and we all had a look - it was really excellent! We had a look around the exhibits, and then went into the planetarium. The planetarium was a small round enclosure with normal seats and a console in the middle from which the show was projected onto the ceiling. The operator sat at console and showed us the night sky and some things to look for, including alignments of planets and eclipses. When he heard we were from Australia he showed us eclipses to watch for in Australia, and gave us a quick tour of what to look for in the Northern Hemisphere sky.