Griffith Observatory
Free since opening day in 1935, and more people have pressed their eye to its Zeiss telescope than any other on Earth.
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The south-facing terrace delivers Downtown LA to the southeast, Hollywood to the south, and the Pacific Ocean to the southwest in a single sweep — plus a close view of the Hollywood Sign. Inside, the 12-inch Zeiss refractor is open to the public; the planetarium trained Apollo program astronauts in celestial navigation before the first lunar missions. Admission has been free since day one, written into benefactor Griffith J. Griffith's will.
What to look for
- The 12-inch Zeiss refracting telescope — over 9 million people have looked through it, making it the most-viewed telescope in the world
- The Hollywood Sign, visible close-up from the terrace on the south-facing slope of Mount Hollywood
- The space-themed interior, where the space theme prevails throughout, in an observatory that opened on May 14, 1935 as the country's third planetarium
Admission is free — required by Griffith J. Griffith's will — and has been since the observatory first opened to 13,000 visitors in its first five days in 1935.
Griffith Observatory is one of 33 sights worth the detour in Los Angeles, all bundled offline in Voyage GO — download the Los Angeles pack and it sits on your map with no signal, filling your travel passport the moment you walk past.
More to see in Los Angeles
- Hollywood Walk of Fame2,850 names pressed into pink terrazzo underfoot — actors, inventors, fictional characters, all at six-foot intervals for 1.3 miles.
- Dolby TheatreThe red carpet runs up these stairs every awards season — where Hollywood officially crowns its year.
- SoFi StadiumA million-square-foot canopy embedded with 27,000 LED pucks bright enough to be seen from planes descending into LAX.
- Hollywood SignA 1923 real-estate billboard that refused to come down — and ended up owning the word "Hollywood" itself.
- U.S. Bank TowerLA sold the sky above a fire-gutted library to fund its own rebuilding — and got its second-tallest tower in the bargain.
- Rose BowlA century-old sunken oval where the 1994 World Cup Final was settled — and the 2028 Olympics will return to do it again.