Since we live near Boston the early Fall is a nice time to head into the city to see the sights. The heat and humidity from July and August are gone – as are most of the summer tourists. So, this September we took a few trips into the city to visit the Boston Common, the Christian Science Plaza and Mapparium, and the Harvard Art Museums. Here’s a brief overview of each of these interesting Boston sights.
 
The Boston Common is a public park in the heart of downtown Boston, consisting of 50 acres of land. Founded in 1634, it is the oldest city park in the United States. During the winter of 1775 and 1776, British soldiers installed artillery entrenchments on the Common, and a garrison of 1,700 Redcoats encamped there. On 24 August 1824 Revolutionary War hero Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert Du Motier Lafayette (the Marquis de Lafayette) celebrated the 50th anniversary of our nation's founding at the Boston Common as part of a 13-month tour of the United States that he took at the invitation of President James Monroe, Although Lafayette had planned to visit only the original 13 colonies, his farewell tour eventually took him to all 24 states. Fun fact: cows were forbidden from grazing on the Common in 1830. Today you can take a Swan Boat ride on the lake, ice skate on the Frog Pond, ride the Carousel, listen to music at the Parkman Bandstand, see the bronze ducks modeled after Robert McCloskey’s famous children's book “Make Way for Ducklings”, play tennis and baseball, or just stroll around and enjoy the grounds and statuary to include:

• George Washington statue
• Lafayette Mall Monument
• Soldiers and Sailors Monument
• Tadeusz Kosciuszko statue
• George Robert White Memorial
• Boston Massacre Memorial
• Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Regiment Memorial
• Thomas Cass statue
• Ether Monument 

​The Christian Science Plaza is a 13.5-acre site that houses the original Mother Church (built in 1894), the Church Extension (built in 1906), the Christian Science Publishing House, The Mary Baker Eddy Library, a 690 x 100-foot reflecting pool, and the Mapparium. The Mapparium is a three-story stained-glass globe, bisected in the middle by a glass walkway so you can walk inside the globe and see the world in a way that doesn't distort the surface of the Earth. The Mapparium globe shows the world as it was in 1935. So, while the size and position of the continents are correct, the map's political boundaries are long out-of-date. Another interesting phenomenon is that the globe reflects sounds such that while you are standing on the bridge can hear a person from the other end when they whisper.

​The Harvard Art Museums are part of Harvard University and comprise three museums: the Fogg Museum (established in 1895), the Busch-Reisinger Museum (established in 1903), and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum (established in 1985). The main building contains approximately 43,000 square feet dedicated to exhibitions for the ~250,000 objects that the museums possess.
 
The Fogg Museum is renowned for its holdings of Western paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, photographs, prints, and drawings from the Middle Ages to the present. Particular strengths include Italian Renaissance, British Pre-Raphaelite, and French art of the 19th century, as well as 19th- and 20th-century American paintings and drawings.
 
The Busch-Reisinger Museum is the only museum in North America dedicated to the study of art from the German-speaking countries of Central and Northern Europe in all media and in all periods. The museum holds one of the first and largest collections of artifacts related to the Bauhaus design school (1919–1933) which fostered many developments in modernist design, late medieval sculpture and 18th-century art.
 
The Arthur M. Sackler Museum collection holds important collections of ancient Mediterranean and Byzantine artifacts comprised of significant works in all media from Greece, Rome, Egypt, and the Near East to include Greek vases, small bronzes, and coins from throughout the ancient Mediterranean world. The museum also specializes in Asian art, most notably, archaic Chinese jades (the widest collection outside of China) and Japanese surimono, as well as outstanding Chinese bronzes, ceremonial weapons, Buddhist cave-temple sculptures, ceramics from China and Korea, Japanese works on paper, and lacquer boxes. In addition, the museum holds works on paper from Islamic lands and India, including paintings, drawings, calligraphy, and manuscript illustrations, with particular strength in Rajput art, as well as important Islamic ceramics from the 8th through to the 19th century.

While we were in the area, we also walked along the Charles River and through Boston University (BU) on one of our visits since it was a beautiful day heading into a clear night.
 
Here are a few photos from our various adventures in Boston: ​(click on any photo to start the slideshow)

Last night, 17 September 2024, the weather was clear enough to see this month’s Harvest Super Moon – but the clouds were also out - so we saw some really interesting sights as the moon and the clouds interacted.
 
As the full Moon closest to the autumnal equinox, this was the Harvest Moon – named as such since during the fall harvest farmers sometimes needed to work late into the night by moonlight. Unlike other full moons, the Harvest Moon rises just after sunset for several consecutive days, creating an extended period of natural light in the early evening.
 
Last night’s moon was also a super moon and the moon appeared particularly large in the sky owing to the coincidence of its closest approach to the earth (the perigee) with a full moon.
 
If you want all of the scientific details, and all the dates, times and distances for full supermoons until the year 2100, Astronomer Fred Espenak has created a table that lists all of them at:

• https://astropixels.com/ephemeris/moon/fullperigee2001.html

 
Here are some of the photos showing the spectacular sights that we saw last night between 9:00 PM and 11:00 PM here on the East Coast: ​ ​(click on any photo to start the slideshow)