41.2165°N · 85.8334°W · ~2M frames · 2025
Winona Lake, 2025
A year of sky, every 15 seconds.
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41.2165°N · 85.8334°W · ~2M frames · 2025
A year of sky, every 15 seconds.
↓ scroll
Explorable · Cloud × Elevation
Each clip is one frame from each day, captured at the same sun height. Tighten the cloud limit and watch the year thin out — clear-sky days are scarce in winter.
How it's made. Every photo's sun position was pre-computed. For each day we pick the single frame when the sun crossed your chosen height, drop days that were too cloudy, and string what's left together — one frame per day.
Look for. At 45° only summer qualifies; the sun never gets that high here in winter. At negative elevations every clip becomes a blue-hour montage. The sun stays in roughly the same spot across all clips — only the world ages.
Solar Locked
The sun returns to the same point in the sky on different days at different times. Pick those moments and you get a video where the world ages while the light holds still.
How it's made. Each clip pins the sun at one exact spot — both how high it is and which direction it's coming from. We find every day the sun actually visited that spot, take one matching frame from each, and play them in sequence.
Look for. Snow appearing and melting in the winter clips. The east-at-dawn and west-at-dusk pairs let you compare sunrise and sunset color over the year. Some clips are short — the sun only reaches certain spots for a few weeks at a time.
Ghostless · Temporal Median
Trees gain leaves and lose them. Snow appears and melts. The lake briefly freezes. Nothing else happens — every cloud, every rain shower, every passing bird has been statistically erased.
How it's made. For every pixel of every output frame, we take the middle value (the median) of all the photos from the previous 24 hours. Things that moved — clouds, branches, birds — get filtered out. Things that stayed still — trees, the dock, the shoreline — survive. The 24-hour window slides forward 6 hours at a time across the whole year.
Look for. The clock overlay flickers because each output frame averages four different timestamps. The dock and grass slowly accumulate snow, then lose it. The lake's color shifts subtly between seasons.
temporal median · 14-day window · year
Sun Paths
On the four hinge dates of the year — both solstices, both equinoxes — the sun draws its own arc across the sky. Side by side, the year's tilt is visible at a glance.
How it's made. Take one frame every 15 minutes through the day. Stack them all into a single image, keeping only the brightest pixel at every spot. The sun is the brightest thing in the sky, so its trajectory over the day gets painted across the result.
Look for. Winter's arc is shallow and short; summer's reaches near the top of the frame. The two equinoxes trace nearly identical paths. The bright continuous streaks aren't separate suns — that's the camera's lens flare smearing through the gaps between the 15-minute samples.
Star Trails
Stars become arcs, planes become dashes, the moon becomes a streak. Each image is one whole clear night compressed to a single still.
How it's made. On the year's clearest nights — picked automatically from the cloud-cover index — every frame from dusk to dawn is stacked into one image, keeping only the brightest pixel at each spot. Anything that moved through the sky leaves a trail.
Look for. Polaris is the still point everything else rotates around. Long straight streaks are airplanes; faint slow ones are satellites. The brightest single trail is usually the moon. Compare summer's short arcs (short nights) to winter's long ones.
Keograms
Every column is a vertical slice of sky from one moment in time. Read left to right, time passes — across hours within a day, or across days within a month.
How it's made. From every photo, we pull a single fixed column of pixels — the slice of sky from horizon to top. Then we stack those columns side by side in chronological order. The result is the entire visual history of the camera, compressed to one image.
Look for. The boundary between dark night and bright day shifts visibly across each monthly strip — sunrises and sunsets sliding earlier or later as the month progresses. Storms appear as gray vertical bruises. Clear days are smooth top-to-bottom gradients; cloudy ones are mottled.
Cloud Motion
Fast cumulus, frontal lines sweeping through, towering build-ups before a storm. The 20 hours of the year where the sky changed the most.
How it's made. For every midday hour, we measure how much each pixel jumped around, then average that across the frame. Sunrise and sunset hours are excluded so the gradual brightness transitions don't fool the score. The 20 highest-scoring hours win.
Look for. August 24, 2025 shows up five separate times in the top 20 — that day must have been wild. Watch for shadow lines sweeping across the lake as fronts roll in, and the rapid build-and-collapse of summer cumulus.
top 20 hours · stitched montage
By the Numbers
A photo every fifteen seconds for fourteen months. Most of those frames are skies you'd skip past; a handful are skies you'd stop and watch. Here's everything together.