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Transcript
At about 6:13am on February 26, 2013, I hit the record button on my camera and shot 20 minutes of slow moving sun and clouds. This is the result at 800 times speed.
The sunrise was scheduled for 6:24am. But light is already painting the Boston skyline from my vantage point on the 6th floor of the MIT Media Lab. We are facing Southeast. The Berkeley Building (also known as at the Old Hancock Building) with its distinctive spire, sits a couple of lesser buildings to the left of the 790foot apex of the newer Hancock Place. The right of our frame is dominated by the buildings of the Prudential Center, with 111 Huntington Avenue and its porous dome next to the Prudential Building’s 749foot prominence.
The backdrop of this skyline is the vertical rainbow cast each morning by the sunrise. A phenomenon known as Rayleigh scattering causes the white light from the sun to split across the sky according to its constituent wavelengths. The shorter wavelengths of blue and violet scatter the furthest through the atmosphere to create our blue sky (since we don’t see violet so well). The longer wavelengths of yellow, orange, and down to red stay close to their source on the horizon.
The temperate this morning hung around freezing with an average wind speed of 3miles per hour. And so we see the smoke from some industrial exhaust pipe holding formation as is rises in the air center frame. A facilities worker stops by my stakeout, in front of the terrace windows, and notes the same plume of smoke. “It’s going to be a nice, calm day,” he says.
I smile as the sunrise finally casts direct light on the undersides of the puffy cloud of smoke, mottling it in pinks and purples like cotton candy. I start to notice the sounds of the city, more traffic passing nearby.
It’s dawn again in Boston and here across the Charles River in Cambridge, at 42 minutes 36 seconds latitude. Tomorrow, the sunrise will be a few moments earlier as the Earth pulls its northern half slowly out of winter.
Lovely and poetic. It’s hard to think of anything less surprising than a sunrise, so by one narrow definition, it’s hard to think of this as news. But it’s also a very elegant way of encouraging us to think about the slow and unchanging, like the buildings on the horizon, which is a striking contrast to the speed of the assignment.