Calgary Tower Blues

What could be better than standing on the sidewalk outside the Calgary tower on an early March evening? Anything. Literally anything.

That could be too harsh. The temperature was a balmy freezing that night. When I was last in Calgary, this past January, the low was -26°C/-15°F. Needless to say, I wasn't out on the streets that night.

The Calgary tower opened to the public on June 30, 1968. At that time is was the tallest building in Canada west of Toronto. How times have changed.

I find it interesting that 60% of the mass of the tower is actually below ground level. That is part of the design to help the tower withstand earthquakes and winds of up to 100 miles per hour. I guess the folks in Calgary are hoping climate change doesn't bring hurricane strength winds east of the Rockies.

At the top of the tower is a revolving restaurant, Sky 360. That's why I was at the tower that night. We had a group reservation for dinner that evening as the closing event of a business conference.

Our reservation spanned twilight and into the night. While the views to the east and south remain unobstructed, more recent, taller, buildings to the North-West and North do obscure those views. Still, I'm a sucker for over-views, partially obstructued but preferably not.

According to the fine folk at Wikipedia, the inner ring of 24 LED lights was added in 2014. They don't say when the outer ring was added. Possibly the same time.

The eight lights at the 11 o'clock point in this image are the glass floor extension to the observation deck, added in 2005. Despite having walked the Skywalk on its opening day, these glass-floored constructions still freak me out!

Image Processing

For this image I:

• Performed some basic adjustments including noise reduction in Adobe Lightroom Classic
• Straightened and cropped the image in Adobe photoshop
• Used Nik Color Efex to make the color pop a little more

Camera

This image was captured in native jpeg format using the rear-facing lens of my then iPhone 6S.