Citizens of the Bay have a necessarily complex relationship with the weather. Between freezing summers, microclimates, and various unlikely precipitations, things falling from the sky are always intruding on our lives. But as we huddled together, cowering from the next climatic shift, one brave man looked up and saw art.

As you can tell from his website, Ken Murphy is a jack of all trades. He invents robots, programs, takes pictures and makes films. His latest project "A History of the Sky" collects a year's worth of time-lapse photos of the San Francisco sky, all taken from the the roof of the Exploratorium. It manages to be experimental, beautiful, practical, and moving all at the same time—no small feat. Make sure to watch it as Murphy suggests, on as big a screen and at as high a resolution as possible.

Check out my Q&A with Murphy after the jump to learn about his process, his plans for the project, and his amazing discovery about our sky.

The Bay Citizen: What inspired "A History of the Sky"? What are your plans for it? 

Ken Murphy: I thought it would be interesting to try to capture patterns in the natural world that we normally are unable to observe directly. After experimenting with a few different approaches, I eventually came up with the idea of using time-lapse photography to create a visualization of the patterns of light and dark, sunrises and sunsets, and clouds, fog, and rain over the course of a year. I think that the natural world resonates with people in a fundamental way, so I suspected that people might feel a similar connection with these patterns that take place on an entirely different time scale. There is a cyclical rhythm to the changing of the seasons, and I think that being able to observe that cyclical pattern directly has a meditative quality to it.

I have different ideas about what shape this project could take in thefuture. One idea is to find a permanent home for it, in the form of a large, projected installation, where the movie is constantly updated with images of the sky captured at the same location. This way, the piece would be a little different every day, and one would always see the most recent year up to the current day. I've been showing it in its large, projected form, using two projectors side-by-side to createan image 20 feet wide and six feet tall, at a handful of gallery events and events like the Maker Faire.  

I like this scale because it allows people to stand back and take in the overall patterns of sunrise and sunset, but it's large enough so that viewers can approach the piece and check out the individual days.

There is a lot of variety in the color, light, and texture of the various days. I've found that some people will sit and take it in for 30 minutes or so (although it helps to provide comfortable seating when showing at large, busy events like the Maker Faire).

TBC: How'd you get a camera on the Exploritorium roof? What's the process of turning the images you capture into what we see in the film?

KM: I had worked with the Exploratorium's Tinkering Studio in the past on an unrelated project (Blinkybugs). When I had the idea for the History of the Sky project, one of the biggest challenges was finding the right location.  

I needed power, network access, and it had to be a secure spot that I could access occasionally for maintenance. I realized the Exploratorium was in the perfect spot: o nthe edge of SF Bay, with a clear view of the sky to the north.

I built a custom shooting rig using an inexpensive compact digital camera controlled by a small computer running Linux.  

This all got installed in a weatherproof metal box. The computer triggered the camera and downloaded it over ten seconds, and renamed the file according to the date and time. These image files were continually downloaded to another computer safe inside the building with a bunch of large disks attached.

The final movie was created using various open-source image-processing tools, such as ImageMagick and FFMpeg, glued together with a bit of my own programming. It's all designed to be totally automated, so in theory I never need to sit down in front of a graphics or movie editing program (although I did to add the titles to the recent version I posted online).

TBC: Did you learn or discover anything surprising while doing this project?

KM: The whole project helped me think about the seasons and the relative movements of the Sun and Earth in a deeper way than I had before.  

For example, it turns out the longest day of the year is not the day of both the earliest sunrise and latest sunset. Also, point at the horizon at which the sun rises and sets throughout the year varies more greatly than I had realized.

 And most of all, I was amazed to see how many days of blue sky there are in San Francisco.