A Good Weekend Part One

It was the labour day weekend. It wasn't a real photography outing kind of weekend although I did carry my camera around the whole time. My brother came to visit so we decided to get out and see the sights. All the best laid plans seemed to fall together quite nicely. 
On Friday Dale and I had the day to ourselves so we went into Vancouver and did a couple things we wanted to. Dale to a music store and me of course to a camera store. We then paid a visit to the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre.

I saw Planetarium Crab Sculpture for the first time on a high school tour and thought how cool it would be to make some kind of walking riding machine out of it. I guess I had a little more imagination then. The sculpture is apparently the most photographed thing in Vancouver. I've taken a few over the years. I don't recall a lot about that trip except they had a real shrunken head on display. Now that was something to see for an impressionable young teen. I can recall looking up close and thinking he might have had freckles. I didn't see the head this visit. I imagine it is stored to avoid upsetting any sensitive souls. 

We saw two shows in the Planetarium Star Theatre. We could have missed the second one as although they were billed as different shows, the second one was mostly a repeat of the first one.

This is the projector they use to create the night sky. The first time I saw it rise out of the bay I imagined it to be some satellite never sent to space and adapted to use as a projector. Making up stuff up like that was so much fun. They call it Harold but they aren't sure why.  

Saturday was a very long but really great day I thought. We headed off to Seattle. On the way down we stopped at the Boeing Future of Flight Museum. The museum part can be gone through fairly quickly, the main attraction is the tour of the Everett production line. There are no cameras allowed so I didn't get any photo's inside. It is about a 90 minute tour of the  huge aircraft manufacturing plant. The buildings themselves are awesome with doors the size of football fields. There were all kinds of interesting facts about them. "At one time rain clouds actually formed in the Boeing plant before a state-of-the-art air circulation system was installed"

They build 747's, 777's, and 787 Dreamliners at this plant. The 787's parts are built elsewhere and put together here. Below is a photo with 2 of the 4 "Dreamlifters", Modified 747's to carry the fuselage sections to the plant from where they're constructed. They said the construction of previous aircraft was measured in weeks, the 787 is put together in mere days.

Another interesting little fact about the production facility is there is no central heating. They use the body heat from staff, heat from lights and tools that rises, is filtered, then pumped down into the building. I thought that was ingenious. 

I was going to try make the whole weekend one blog post but It is getting a little longer to put together than I thought so I am going to do this in three parts. I'll try be a little more diligent with the next two.