Introduction

On January 1st, 2015, I watched the first sunrise of the year in Cartagena, Colombia. I sat on the pier and watched the sky changed colors. The sun slowly raised above the horizon and darkness subsides. The sky changed from dark blue to purple, from purple to orange and yellow. There were so many colors that are beyond my words for description. I was enchanted by the colors produced by nature and decided to take on the challenge of replicating these colors and the sunrise watching experience for a wider audience using computational methods.

When the sun rises, it projects magical colors on the sky. The sun and the sky jointly compose the greatest beauty found in nature. The colors seen at sunrise arise from a phenomenon called scattering. On their path through the atmosphere shorter wavelengths are scattered out of the line of sight. When the sun is low on the horizon, sunlight passes through more air at sunrise than during the day. Thus there more molecules to scatter the violet and blue light away from your eyes. The other colors continue on their way to your eyes. This is why sunsets are often warm colors, like yellow, orange, and red.

The natural cycle of light and darkness is necessary for our circadian clocks to function, and sunlight has many therapeutic uses, including coping depression, controlling toxins, and promoting the synthesis of vitamin D. As the modern artificial lighting predominantly extends evening activity and our exposure to light, and as bright light during the evening is known to delay circadian rhythms, this chronic exposure gradually leads to seasonal mental disorder. Research has shown that exposure to sunrise is can ease mental health issues and stress. The sun is a symbol of enlightenment, spirituality, eternity, warmth, and optimism. Through this project, I hope to encourage people to get up early to watch sunrises and enjoy these precious moments in life produced by the nature.

As Earth orbits, sunlight reaches different parts of the world at different times. The sunrises locations move along the longitude throughout the day. The rotation of the earth around the sun gives us a notion of time, and we assign different time zones to different areas in the world.

With the mission statement, “To capture and share the world’s moments", Instagram enables users to experience moments in others’ lives through pictures as they happen [Instagram, 2015]. Instagram users around the world try to capture the beautiful sunrisescape in real time to share the pictures on their feed. There are currently about 25,000,000 pictures that are #sunrise uploaded on Instagram. A new picture with the hashtag "#sunrise" is uploaded every 1-5 second.

This installation, #Sunrise, is started for the above reasons, to create an ongoing sunrise watching experience that is collectively created by Instagram users from around the world. I created a system to download the latest #sunrise pictures from Instagram in real time and pin the pictures to the world map using their associated geolocation information. I then run an algorithm to extract the sky colors that are channeled into a composition to create an eternal sunrise. This animated composition reflects the everchanging colors that are captured by Instagram users in a certain part of the world in real time.