Put a stable camera in some reasonably interesting, webcam-worthy location. Have it take a picture once every four minutes for a year; archive these pictures without publishing them.

Then start running a Web site to display the pictures, but swap time of day with time of year. For example, on March 28, the web site would show only images gathered at 5:40 AM. At midnight on March 28, it would show an image from 5:40 AM on January 1; four minutes later, the site would refresh to show an image from 5:40 AM on January 2. By noon, it would be showing images from 5:40 AM in June. At 11:56 PM or so, it would show an image from 5:40 AM on December 31; when the time rolled over to midnight on March 29, it would show the image from 5:44 AM on January 1.

(As this is happenning, it's squirreling images away for next year's display, of course.)

This would give people a chance to witness time and date in a different way. The change wouldn't be seamless -- the weather varies from day to day -- but there would still be some continuity from one image to the next.

(Ideally, the location would be one that has something interesting to see at night. Otherwise, one might want to start the year at dawn and end the year at dusk.)
-- egnor, Mar 28 2001

I quite like this idea - it shouldn't be too hard to do, either
-- hippo, Mar 29 2021


I'm sure I have seen this kind of thing, a whole year compressed into a few minutes. If you include the southern sky in your field of view you can see the sun and moon doing their thing as the ecliptic rotates around the sky.
-- pocmloc, Mar 29 2021


How is this different from living in Michigan?
-- RayfordSteele, Mar 29 2021


Nice as a single timestamp portrait but to get pattern comparisons this will need video timelapsing with split screens of the data.

I'm wondering if an image AI, given all the pictures amassed, could give the next closest 5 pictures( only from data set) to the current sequence? A picture weather forecast.
-- wjt, Apr 01 2021


Ooh, clever;

Red sky at night:
Shepherd's data processing artefact.
-- pertinax, Apr 02 2021


[pertinax & wjt] - that is clever
-- hippo, Apr 02 2021



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