A panoramic view of Santa Monica Bay is projected at the Camera Obscura (Latin for "dark room"; "darkened chamber") at Palisades Park on Tuesday, December 8, 2009.

The camera obscura is an optical device that projects an image of its surroundings on a screen. It is used in drawing and for entertainment, and was one of the inventions that led to photography. The device consists of a box or room with a hole in one side. Light from an external scene passes through the hole and strikes a surface inside where it is reproduced, upside-down, but with color and perspective preserved. The image can be projected onto paper, and can then be traced to produce a highly accurate representation. As a pinhole is made smaller, the image gets sharper, but the projected image becomes dimmer.