Seattle Sky Colors

The Seattle Sky Series is a project that captures the average daily sky color over the course of 365 days.

In order to calculate the average daily sky color we set up a time-lapse camera in a windowsill. The camera was set up to run 24 hours a day, and captured one image every 15 minutes.

The time-lapse captures were edited down so we processed images from 4:00 AM to 9:00 PM. At the beginning of the project we performed some exploratory studies and found that if we used all 24 hours that the colors became very muddy due to the dominance of the night time images. We thus opted for a shorter time window that allowed us to see a wider dynamic range of average sky colors throughout the Seattle seasons.

To determine the average daily sky colors, we wrote a Python script to compute the average RGB value for each frame of the time-lapse capture. From these intraframe averages we computed a daily average, and from the daily averages we computed a monthly average.