Today was set aside exclusively for the Deutsches Museum – the largest science and technology museum in Europe. The museum has over 50 sections on eight floors, any one section could keep you occupied for hours. As an example, just in the Metals area they have lifesize dioramas of mines, scale models of ore refining plants, a waterwheel powered blacksmith shop, a teaching area with milling equipment, and a full scale display on casting aluminum block engines. Or how about examples of keys and locks from pre-1500’s to today? We expected the Power Machinery to be about electric drills (No! That’s in the machine tools exhibit!), but instead it was about animal and water powered early machines.

We probably spent most of our time in the Aeronautics and Astronautics sections. It was shocking to see a cross-section of a full A300 Airbus intermingled with the other aircraft, the wing stretched out over other displays. The slice included the fuselage, the wing, the engine and landing gear, all of which were also cut open to expose their inner workings.

The Computers section included a Cray-1 (PDI’s nemesis machine from the mid-1980’s) and a Remington Rand UNIVAC which looked more like a trailer filled with vacuum tubes than a computer.

Looking at my Fitbit stats, and taking into account all other walking that day, I think we covered between 5 and 6 miles inside the museum.

We had dinner at the nearby Viktualienmarkt, a permanent outdoors farmer’s market where we wish we had eaten the first day.

That evening I was inspired by the photography exhibit at the museum to create my own camera obscura in my hotel room to photograph my skyline view. At 7:30 pm the sun is still up, but low in the sky. I stripped the hotel room walls of hanging pictures, set up my camera on a tripod and closed the blackout curtains. I then held the curtains in a way to allow light through only about one square inch of window – my camera aperture. After a few tries I nailed the exposure (30 seconds, f4.0, ISO 100) and produced the picture below. The light from outside the room enters through the small gap and hits the opposite wall. Optics works in such a way that the image is inverted (Germany is in the northern hemisphere, so it isn’t upside down outside like New Zealand is). Pretty cool.