Monday, March 31, 2014

Sunrise Video (first edit)

Hey, everyone.
Check out the video I made with today's sunrise footage:



This is probably at the limit of my current abilities and available time, so if anyone knows how to make it better, let me know. I can make small adjustments (color, speed, exposure), but Final Cut can't make cleaner crops around each photo (the cropping rotates with the image, so straightening the pic also means that the cropping boundary is rotated, hence the crookedness).

Enjoy!

P.S. I slowed the footage to 50% and then cropped off extraneous stuff at the beginning and end. It could theoretically be longer, although there's not much more "earlier" (i.e. undeveloped footage) to work with.

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Sunrise Location Scouting Update

Hey, everyone.

Somehow I was able to wake up very early this morning and got to north campus before sunrise.

I started out on the third floor of the Duderstadt looking out from the eastern windows near Design Lab 3. All I saw was another taller building, so I headed there next.
I think it was the IOE building.

Anyway, I headed up to the top floor, which was the General Motors Conference room. It was a weird place:


At some point I pressed a bunch of buttons on the wall trying to turn a light on, and it made a door on the other side of the room swing open.

Anyway, this was the view from there:


Pretty lame.

I did a bit more research and found that not only can you use this site to look up the elevation of a specific point in town, but a city official has already determined the highest point for us.

I think elevation is going to be the key here, since you cannot view the horizon directly from north campus. I'm going to check out the area mentioned in that site some time before next week. Let me know if you're interested in joining me.

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Whiz kid from Sierra Leone

To put some perspective on what we're doing, check out this self-taught maker from Sierra Leone.

Sunday, March 9, 2014

Suncalc

This thing is pretty sweet:
http://www.suncalc.net/

It's particularly fascinating to see a graphic representation of how much the sun's arc changes throughout the year.
The photo below is today's trajectory.