Tuesday, September 10th - Paris
Tuesday morning we awoke bright and early again for a long drive out of the Netherlands towards France. Our final destination, the Observatory di Paris. We departed around 6am to beat the rush hour traffic in Paris. Unfortunately, we did not anticipate traffic in the cities that we would be passing through on the way to Paris. We stopped off at a cute little roadside cafeteria for breakfast and got our temporary caffeine fix with healthy doses of cappuccino and espresso (which could not compare to our daily cappuccinos in Italy, but they worked). Thanks to the maps application on Kris’ iPhone, we successfully navigated the 5-hour trip across Belgium to France. Once into the city, we made our way downtown, past the University and finally to the observatory complex where our hosts were anxiously awaiting our arrival.
Lunch at the observatory lounge was wonderful. We dined on French cheeses and breads as well as tried some freshly made quiche and the French specialty dessert, Floating Island. We got our fill of goodies and headed off to the main observatory building to begin setting up our interview with Dr. Tobias Owen. Dr. Owen is a professor of Astronomy at the University of Hawaii and is currently 12-days into a 3-month stay in Paris before returning to Hawaii. He and his wife are still settling into the Parisian atmosphere.
We took in the extraordinary view of the city from the observatory roof and enjoyed filming in one of the oldest domes at the facility that could be accessed from the roof. To aid in our lighting, we used the natural light of the opening of the dome to illuminate a staircase and an observer’s chair where Dr. Owen sat as we interviewed him. Once set up and prepared to film, we went to sync our audio and video together when one of the cameras completely shut down. In our frantic search for an answer to why this happened, we set up the lavaliere microphones hooked up to the lapel of Dr. Owen to collect audio and used one of the smaller cameras to capture the close-up shot that was lost due to the collapse of the one HD camera. The interview took a bit longer than expected, but to everyone’s delight, Dr. Owen did a wonderful job of answering all of our questions in the time we had remaining. As soon as the interview was completed, the crew packed up the gear and vacated the dome while Scott and Dr. Owen went to the lower floors of the observatory and to the outside entryway of the building to get some additional perspective and b-roll shots to complete our desired shots from our road trip.
The quick trip to Paris was quite an adventure. 5 hour drive from Middelburg, 2-hour stay in the city for the interview and then another 6-hour drive back to Amsterdam to spend the night there before our early-morning flight from Amsterdam to Madrid on our way to the island of La Palma. The most western island of the Canaries housed the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory, a beautiful collection on telescopes at the top of the highest summit of La Palma.