Capturing the sunrise

Life moves quickly. I often think and reflect on how quickly the year goes... somehow it's already August. A project I created attempts to capture the flow of time is a Skylapse.cam.

Here's how it works. At home I have a Raspberry Pi using an HQ camera that wakes up every morning, calculates the time of sunrise and then captures an image every 10 seconds for an hour. Once all the images are captured, there's a script on the Pi that creates a timelapse video that is 12 seconds long (30 frames per second).

Once the video is generated on the Pi, it uploads the video and thumbnail to an S3 bucket. It uploads the dated copy (timelapse_MM-DD-YY.mp4) and a rolling latest copy (latest.mp4). These are served through CloudFront.

There's a simple static site that points to the latest video at the root domain (skylapse.cam).

Here's what the Pi and camera look like on my window, attached via a suction cup:

I've been capturing sunrises for the past year (maybe more than a year?). It's nice to be able to see the sunrise on your own time rather than to wake up super early. Sunrises are also a great indicator what the weather will be like for the rest of the day, especially in microclimates like San Francisco.

When I'm traveling it's nice to see how interesting or boring the sunrise was for that day.

Here are a few of my favorite timelapses:

Check out this morning's sunrise here, Skylapse.cam.