BOSTON MUSEUM OF SCIENCE

This last weekend, we travelled to Boston to visit Michelle and Tobias and to do a little sightseeing.  [The next several posts will cover that trip.]  We visited Boston's Museum of Science on Friday afternoon.  We were quite impressed with the overall quality of the exhibits.  They included giant models of insects, such as grasshoppers . . . 

 and mosquitos.

For photographic purposes museum lighting is always problematic, as it is generally lower than one would like.  So I found myself ramping up the ISO rating to compensate.  In addition, the color of the light often varies from one exhibit to another.  I generally keep my white balance set to "cloudy" for daytime outside shots, but in the museum I generally switched to automatic and let the camera do the best it could to get the right color, knowing I could always change it in post-processing.

This was more of a science museum than a natural history museum, so there were not a lot of exhibits devoted to subjects such as paleontology, though there were a few, such as the following array of hominid skulls.

I thought the following fossil was also well presented.

But the model of T-Rex was pretty lame.  (Milwaukee's is much better.)

It must of have been someone's idea that T-Rex would be in military camouflage.

The museum included the world's largest Van de Graaff static electricity generator and we were able to take in part of a demonstration.  The towers in the photo below were probably 20-25 feet tall.

The lighting on this apparatus was quite dramatic, though, because of the low lighting, I had the ISO ramped up to 2500 for this shot, which had an exposure of 1.3 seconds.  It appears that there were four separate electrical discharges that occurred during this exposure.

The planetarium connected with the museum had recently reopened and we took in a show.  It was pretty elementary, as most of the audience were kids.  However, there were some interesting astronomy exhibits in that area of the museum, including some great photos . . .

and models of planets.

I thought the best section of the museum was the one devoted to mathematics.  This was not "dumbed down" and included a number of models of mathematical objects, which provided some interesting visual patterns.  A couple I turned into B&Ws . . .

or near-B&Ws.

Finally, I liked the following shot of a cross-section of a nautilus shell.  Admittedly, this is nothing new, but it did provide a pleasing pattern.