The airport from which we departed is at Mascot, which is on that body of water way down in the distance. If memory serves me correctly, we had the good fortune of being stuck in a holding pattern for a little while which meant that we covered the same area a couple of times. In this case, as you can see from the compass, we are just a little bit to the west of south, looking back at the skyline of the city of North Sydney, the Harbour Bridge, Sydney Harbour, the Opera House, the Botanic Gardens to the left of it, and Circular Quay and the Sydney CBD to the right, then out through the southern suburbs of Sydney toward Botany Bay and Mascot.

One feature that hadn't appeared in any of my previous shots, and barely appears in this one is that small, regular, rocklike island in the middle of the harbour. That is Fort Denison, also known as Pinchgut Island. Its original purpose was to serve as a place of punishment for particularly recalcitrant prisoners. One convict was sentenced to a week on bread and water in irons, a punishment from which the name "Pinchgut" is derived.

Later on, convicts were hung on the island and left there to rot in some cases for years, to encourage the behaviour of others.

In 1839, 2 American warships entered the harbour at night which triggered a review of the defences. Fortification of the island began in 1841 but was not completed until 1857. By that time the governor of New South Wales was Sir William Denison, from which the official name is derived.

However I'll leave further discussion of that to photos which show the island more clearly.

Another site that I had not previously mentioned is just to the right of the windscreen frame; you can see the large cable stays of the Anzac Bridge, an 8 lane construction and which was built in 1995 to connect the western fringe of the central business district with the western suburbs.