Every Sunrise in October

12 Nov 2015

I have been working on a sunrise project that is heavily inspired by Ken Murphy's amazing History of the Sky project. I loved what he did, and I decided to use a Raspberry Pi to do something similar using the Chicago Skyline and our daily sunrise. I was completely sure how to make this project work, and I still have some unanswered questions. Things are coming along nicely, though. I thought that I would post my first 30 days of sunrises here for you to see. You can also link to it here (https://youtu.be/ixQvy3rIkEU).

My colleagues at DePaul let me set up a camera. My 'weatherproof' box is really a plastic sandwich box from Target. I use a Dropbox uploader to send all of my movies to my Dropbox account every day, and I use another Raspberry Pi to download them, break them in to stills, and batch resize them. I then used Imagemagick to make a tiled 'montage' and that gets compressed into another movie.

I hope you enjoy it! I have instructions on this process that will follow soon!

Top Comments

mcb1 over 9 years ago in reply to DAB

I mounted mine inside an Outdoor Lamp. Catch Santa Challenge
I didn't test it long enough but I'm sure if you added RainX on the glass, the water would disipate.

Mark
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DAB over 9 years ago in reply to mikedavis

You could use the moving transparent belt used on racing cars or maybe a compressed air system to blow off the drops.

Wipers would probably get too streaky, but they could also be an option.

DAB
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mikedavis over 9 years ago

On rainy days, the lens gets obscured by a water droplet. That happened a couple times. My enclosure is a sandwich container, and the camera lens is exposed. When I work on the next version of this project, I plan to make something that will protect the lens from the Chicago weather a little better.
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Instructorman over 9 years ago

Very cool Mike.
I find time lapse fascinating because it adds another layer of perspective to the normal perception of time flow.
I'd like to develop a project around capturing the movement of the sun across the sky over a year and, derive from that data set, a solar analemma.

Hey, what was happening on the morning of October 27th? The image is really small, but it looks like there is Vaseline on the lens or Chicago was experiencing a major dust storm.
Mark A
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thegnnus over 9 years ago

Mike what a cool project I love making Timelapse's and this shows another good format.. Will you be posting the instructions.
Now off to find the software.
TerryR
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