With the school year behind me, I finally have some time to work on projects that I have been dreaming up all year. The abundance of free time also means that I am saying 'yes' to a lot of things, and I will soon start to run out of time again. Regardless, I will complete at least one project this summer!
One thing I wanted to do was re-create Ken Murphy's beautiful 'Year of the Sky on Earth'. In this project, he put camera on top of the Exploratorium in San Francisco. He took a picture of the sky every 10 seconds for a year, and they put all of the time lapse movies together in one panel.
What I love about this project is that it really captures how sunrise/sunset changes with the seasons. This gives teachers an opportunity to talk about the seasons from a planetary perspective. It turns out that people have some very strongly held misconceptions when it comes to the reason for the seasons.
Now that I have a little practice with the Raspberry Pi and cron, I can see how something like this might work. I would need:
- A program to start my camera every day at the same time, and let it run until a certain time.
- A program to turn those pictures into a movie file, and put that into a Dropbox account.
- A program to remove the pictures each night, and start again.
I would like to recreate this in Chicago with a clear view of the skyline, facing east. I have a school that is ready to participate, and I (more or less) have the code necessary to do it. As I am doing this, I am running into some predictable problems. I think I see solutions to them, which is encouraging. My hope is to start my project by June 1st, and of course, I will keep the community posted with what is going on.
If there is anything you'd all suggest, I would be more than happy to hear from you!
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