Seattle Sky Colors

Personal Design Project | Programming by Mario Rosasco | Made in 365 Days | Funded on Kickstarter, 2018

If you have ever lived in or visited Seattle, Washington, you know that it has a reputation for being one of the grayest cities in the United States. From roughly September to May each year, Seattle has a consistently gray cloud cover that sometimes allows a brief glimpse of sun to pass through. With that in mind, we sought out to find just how gray the Seattle sky is.

The Seattle Sky Series is a project that captures the average daily sky color over the course of 365 days. This project captures a breakdown of each average daily color, and a month-by-month overview for 2018.

This project was successfully funded in January 2019 on Kickstarter.

Modern Empty Room, 3d render interior design, mock up illustration

The Process

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, Mario 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.
Even though we knew what we were expecting to find from our years of living in Seattle, we still found it fascinating to observe the ebb and flow of light throughout the year. We hope you’ll enjoy sharing this journey through the seasons and colors of the Seattle sky.