I found a new and beautiful view of the Boston skyline from the parking at the base of the tower in Mount Auburn Cemetery. You can also view and download these photos here.
You can drive to this location in Mount Auburn Cemetery. The photo I took were taken from the car window; not from the tower. (You can climb to the base, not sure if the tower itself is open.)
Here's the Google Earth photo showing the tower. The pictures were taken from the road at the base of the stairs.
Here's the view from the car. I used a Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS7 (a $250 compact camera that I HIGHLY recommend). This is with its 25mm equivalent wide angle. The other photos are with it's 150mm equivalent. (It has a 12x zoom that can go to 300mm!) The photos were taken hand-held, at 1/100 sec. The camera has an optical image stabilizer that make a tripod unnecessary.
Here is a remarkably accurate view from Google Earth, showing Boston's skyline with the 3D buildings layer turned on.
As the sun moved, the lighting changed minute by minute.
The same view from Google Earth. Not bad!
If you double click on the Google Earth KMZ file below, you'll get what happens in this movie. How cool is that? A zoom from space to the very spot where I took these photos.