#50a7f1 from this morning is an incredibly beautiful blue<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;storage.googleapis.com&#x2F;nskyc-3727d.appspot.com&#x2F;nyc&#x2F;1686302100760.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;storage.googleapis.com&#x2F;nskyc-3727d.appspot.com&#x2F;nyc&#x2F;1...</a>Makes me miss NYC.

YC116 aims to find out. Now hiring. Our mission: Making the world a better place by making the sky HN orange.

The Tubbs fire did a fine job of this, but it’s always dimmer than the luminosity of HN orange on a typical screen, so it depends on how you define “color”.

Not being exact, but at least 150+ AQI seems to generate a significant impact on sunlight coming through creating that &quot;smoky&quot;&#x2F;&quot;faded&quot; look. I can&#x27;t comment on how to get the orange exactly as I think it also requires specific particulate matter to get that.

What concentration of fine particulates would be necessary to produce a sky the exact color of HN&#x27;s header?

Such a great little website. you can see it was more orange than Hackernews header just 2 days back.

I think it must have a fixed white balance, or the average hue captured would hardly change over time at all.Adjusting the inside lights until the inside sensor is satisfied, rather than based on specifying in absolute units, would also have the benefit of taking into account any influence on indoor overall color contributed by your walls, window coverings, and anything else. Might need to average multiple sensors for best results, unless a single sensor does that through a wide angle diffuser.This is a bit like how automatic audio equalizers (I think Sonos offers this, for example) don&#x27;t work just by ensuring that the speaker delivers the desired frequency response curve (or lack thereof), but by actually using a measurement mic, since your experience will be influenced by the combination of speaker+room. The difference is that you only need to have the mic around when making changes to the room&#x2F;furniture (which is rare) whereas you&#x27;d be making changes to the indoor light bulbs continuously (based on outdoor light), so you need your indoor sensor running continuously.

What the high end variable-temperature lighting systems seem to do is just use your clock and latitude to simulate what color temperature the sky would be at a given time of day, and set the lights to that.I&#x27;ve never seen it in action, I only have boring old single-color lights. I am not really annoyed by 2700K lamps during the day, and mixing daylight and 2700K doesn&#x27;t really look as awful as you&#x27;d think during zoom calls.

Your idea is pretty straightforward. Set up a camera outside, point it at the sky, capture a screenshot, average the color, set smart lights to that color.Presto, yellow sky makes yellow light.You’ll quickly grow tired of how it looks. And not because it isn’t calibrated correctly.

If only color calibration were that easy.People should really get comfortable with the idea that color is relative, so choose whatever looks nice to you and stick with it. True Tone certainly isn’t scientific.In this scenario, all that matters is that the instrument doesn’t try to change its white balance. You can actually calculate the spectral energy of the sky based on these color changes alone, and it doesn’t matter if you start at a white balance of fluorescent or incandescent.

Could be mistaken but I think my Mac already does this -- it has &quot;true tone&quot; and when I open the lid, my main external monitor changes color temperature.I wonder if there&#x27;s a way to scrape that data and then send it to Home Assistant for light control.

I wonder how the camera was calibrated in terms of white balance (if at all).I have this idea to implement in my house: a sensor that would measure temperature of the light outside and set the lights inside to the same temperature. Getting this measurement right seems to be non-trivial. Though maybe it wouldn&#x27;t have to be exact in terms of physical units, a pair of sensors calibrated together (one for outside, one for inside) might achieve the desired result too.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;firesmoke.ca" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;firesmoke.ca</a> is an excellent resource for seeing the current smoke levels across the continent.

Ahh, my geography was completely off, I was picturing NY where Buffalo currently is.. I can&#x27;t believe I forgot it&#x27;s on the Atlantic.

At the latitudes of the US and Canada, the prevailing winds blow from west to east.

I find it fascinating how Toronto is no where near as bad as New York. The fight to protect the environment has to be a global one

Average how? In RBG? HSL? LAB?Average raw RGB gives you bad results.

The author is a designer who do many creative coding projects, he mentioned in an interview[1] back in 2011 that:&gt; I wrote this program that hooks up to a webcam. It takes a photo out the window every five minutes, and it will upload that to a server. The server then reads the sky portion of the photo, and it goes pixel by pixel. What it does is it takes all those values, the RGB values, and it averages them. So what you are seeing is not the dominant color in the sky it’s actually just the average color.Mike Bodge&#x27;s personal website:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bod.ge&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bod.ge&#x2F;</a>Recent tweet by author: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;mikebodge&#x2F;status&#x2F;1666507978663690240" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;mikebodge&#x2F;status&#x2F;1666507978663690240</a>Here&#x27;s also a submission from a decade ago (2011): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=2685621" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=2685621</a>Shameless plug: Assisted by my HNRelevant browser extension[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.villagevoice.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;06&#x2F;23&#x2F;mike-bodge-nskyc-creator-talks-new-york-city-weather-food-and-crushes&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.villagevoice.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;06&#x2F;23&#x2F;mike-bodge-nskyc-cre...</a>

It appears that the camera provider was switched around 1 day ago [0].[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;mikebodge&#x2F;status&#x2F;1666541169273372672" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;mikebodge&#x2F;status&#x2F;1666541169273372672</a>

The first two night photos have logos for EarthCam, Live, and some location data. Seems they found a way to remove those in later images.

i presume you&#x27;re on mobile and it&#x27;s not visible there. on desktop you can hover any section and you will see the picture that is used as the source.

Has the developer of this posted any blog or documentation of how it works? What hardware&#x2F;software is used for it?

Nice, however &quot;a day ago&quot; isn&#x27;t particularly helpful. For this local EDT time would be fine, but I&#x27;d like to know it it&#x27;s 8am or 11am

Zooming out is kinda neat...But I would like to be able to see the background image for some of the shots bythemselves - as there are some cool pics of that view.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;S9I3arV.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;S9I3arV.png</a>

Yeah you can&#x27;t just do this with a consumer webcam out of the box because they&#x27;re constantly trying to auto-adjust the white point. I mean not if you want anything &quot;accurate&quot;. (Some webcams allow you to lock the white point in software though.)But indeed, it is very non-obvious what you&#x27;d select for the constant exposure and white point (or combined as a gray point). You might also want to apply a strong curve to the brightness so nighttime skies are quite visible.

It would be interesting if he specified how he came up with RGB values for sky color, like what is his neutral grey point etc.

Manhattan 2 days ago vs Night of the Comet:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;MYpreX5" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;MYpreX5</a>EarthCam view:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.earthcam.com&#x2F;usa&#x2F;newyork&#x2F;worldtradecenter&#x2F;?cam=skyline_g" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.earthcam.com&#x2F;usa&#x2F;newyork&#x2F;worldtradecenter&#x2F;?cam=s...</a>No idea if this link remains permanent:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;static.earthcam.com&#x2F;&#x2F;hof&#x2F;newyork&#x2F;skyline&#x2F;1686200442449_12.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;static.earthcam.com&#x2F;&#x2F;hof&#x2F;newyork&#x2F;skyline&#x2F;16862004424...</a>

Scroll down to the end of the page to 2 days ago! It&#x27;s insane!

This is such a cool idea. Some people are so cleaver.

I agree and if you want to refer to a color in an absolutely correct, objective, device-independent manner you need to define it in terms of L*a*b*The CIELAB coordinate space represents the entire gamut of human photopic (daylight) vision and far exceeds the gamut for sRGB or CMYK.You might initially think that the three axes of what is &quot;RGB&quot; defines a perfect color cube which accurately describes all perceptible colors but this is not true. The typical RGB we encounter when encoded with an sRGB gamut (almost always on smartphones, TVs, and PCs as of 2023) forms a bizzare polyhedron in the objective L*a*b* color space instead of filling the whole thing with itself because it is just a small subset of what we can actually see: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;File:SRGB_gamut_within_CIELAB_color_space_mesh.webm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;File:SRGB_gamut_within_CIELAB_...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;CIELAB_color_space" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;CIELAB_color_space</a>

It&#x27;s going to depend on the camera and processing, since the dynamic range of human vision extends well beyond the RGB color range.

1WTC and all the other buildings are pretty bright at night. I assume if they were physically masked out, the camera would have better chance to pick up some light reflected off the atmosphere

#000 I didn&#x27;t think it&#x27;d be that dark even at local midnight

For SF, there&#x27;s <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;isitfoggy.com&#x2F;daylight2.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;isitfoggy.com&#x2F;daylight2.html</a>

Over a decade ago my wife was thru hiking and got caught in the smoke of a California wildfire. The ash scratched her corneas and her vision is still impacted to this day.It&#x27;s definitely not something to take lightly, even if you wear a mask.

It&#x27;s actually back in the healthy range as of this morning! I could immediately tell the difference when I woke up before sunrise, I went for a long walk outside and it felt great.

That&#x27;s not the equality I wanted.

It’s not great, but for comparison many cities in Asia have a much worse AQI much more often.

&gt; My heart goes out to new yorkers. This cannot be healthy. If there are long-standing health repercussions I doubt there will be any recourse they can take.It&#x27;s not good, but it&#x27;s far from the worst around. The peak AQI here in NYC was about 350, which is actually much lower than the average AQI in Delhi between November and January, for example. (Air pollution is highly seasonal).Effects of air pollution are cumulative, so the people who really suffer the most from it are the ones who experience this regularly, as opposed to historical anomalies like this.

We&#x27;ve (Coloradoans)been dealing with wildfire smoke pretty much forever. On average our air quality is quite good, but fires in any of the PNW&#x2F;SW states regularly impact our air quality during the spring, summer, and fall. We held the dubious title of worst air quality in the world for at least a day earlier this spring.It&#x27;s been a little comical having this NYC air quality situation keep finding it&#x27;s way into my news sources -- it&#x27;s been a part of my life as long as I&#x27;ve been alive. I check the FireNow site as much as I check the weather during the warm month.

On the Front Range, where most people live in Colorado (~Denver + north and south 60 miles), the air quality can actually get pretty bad due to inversion, and this has been noted since pre-statehood. We also are lucky enough to get a lot of wild fire smoke from California, Canada, the PNW, as well as our own home sourced wildfires. Maybe 2 years ago it felt like the whole summer was smoky, and we had stretches where the AQI was 500+ here in Boulder.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;denvergazette.com&#x2F;outtherecolorado&#x2F;news&#x2F;the-brown-cloud-denver-air-quality-concerns-date-back-to-1800s&#x2F;article_67d52fbf-cf8b-5e9d-8b71-f38fca214fb4.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;denvergazette.com&#x2F;outtherecolorado&#x2F;news&#x2F;the-brown-cl...</a>

Or you can live in the Colorado with fresh air, but way more UV exposure. There are always trade-offs.

&gt; People will be fine and no one is going to develop long term health issues from a couple days of smokey air. I feel bad for people with lung conditions as breathing was made more difficult for a bit but no one is dying from this.That&#x27;s simply not true. People can, and do, develop long-term issues from acute exposure to bad air (that&#x27;s literally why the range is called &quot;Hazardous&quot; on the AQI).Not to mention that one in ten New Yorkers has asthma, which means that yes, people can literally die from acute exposure to air pollution.

People will be fine and no one is going to develop long term health issues from a couple days of smokey air. I feel bad for people with lung conditions as breathing was made more difficult for a bit but no one is dying from this.And what recourse? Who?

No, we’ve got a good thing going obviously. We have a nice big peaceful border, they send us celebrities and artists, and we will absolutely demolish any country that fucks with them.We generate plenty of wildfire smoke internally anyway.

Because that worked out so well for us the last time we tried... [0][0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;War_of_1812" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;War_of_1812</a>

Haven&#x27;t the Americans looked for a reason to invade Canada, for like ... forever?

It mostly seems to have moved down to Pennsylvania at this point.Smoke happens, it is bad, but I’m sure everybody in the country gets it a couple times in their life (unless you live on Martha’s Vineyard or something).

My heart goes out to new yorkers. This cannot be healthy. If there are long-standing health repercussions I doubt there will be any recourse they can take.

From some fiddling in an image editor, it looks like it&#x27;s a fairly small rectangle (I&#x27;d guess top left corner?)

Based on the color selected out of the night shots, I&#x27;m assuming the average is of just the plain sky, with the water and buildings cropped out.

Is this data not polluted by the skyline? Or does it somewhat take buildings&#x2F;the skyline into account, and correct for the shades of these objects?

Hot take: Canadians may need to learn controlled burns.

Yes, but that was in Alberta. The smoke in New York is coming from fires in Ontario and Quebec, which were probably started by lightning strikes.

I read that article. What is the possible connection to DEI programs?

That fire did happen, but was extinguished about a month ago:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.albertaprimetimes.com&#x2F;beyond-local&#x2F;banffs-out-of-control-prescribed-fire-extinguished-6994121" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.albertaprimetimes.com&#x2F;beyond-local&#x2F;banffs-out-of...</a>The &#x27;urban legend&#x27; remains because it is constantly mentioned on right-wing &#x27;news&#x27; sites as proof that DEI programs are dangerous to society.

Is the urban legend that it started out of controlled burn at WTREX conference true? Couldn&#x27;t verify, but there are also no outlets debunking it.

Very cute, although I&#x27;d like to see what the results are like when choosing the dominant rather than the average color.

Such a simple idea, yet so well executed.

Things start to get interesting if you zoom out:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;files.littlebird.com.au&#x2F;Shared-Image-2023-06-10-08-58-59-sHVdmt.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;files.littlebird.com.au&#x2F;Shared-Image-2023-06-10-08-5...</a>

It&#x27;s unfortunate you can&#x27;t bookmark dates but really cool none the less.

I stiched the last two days of this into a quick Timelapse - very cool to watch.
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;KTv6tqyr8YU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;KTv6tqyr8YU</a>

Related: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nyctimescape.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nyctimescape.com&#x2F;</a>

The vague timestamps like &quot;an hour ago&quot; are an odd choice, since they&#x27;re very non-unique.

With some kind of API to retrieve the colors the site would be really useful.

airnow is almost useless in some areasThe only single sensor near my city is 50 miles away, it says air quality is fine, yet the smoke tracker map has several wildfires nearbyWe need a huge, reliable pm2.5 etc network, start with every single public school

Also <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fire.airnow.gov&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fire.airnow.gov&#x2F;</a>

national smoke map<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;data.usatoday.com&#x2F;fires&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;data.usatoday.com&#x2F;fires&#x2F;</a>

Does this go back further than 2 days?

Without really supporting or elaborating on your thesis here, this comment it basically content-free.

Sure, I will explain. New York is one of the epicenters of consumption that has driven climate change and precipitated the wild fires in Canada. The USA has been one of the most sustained producers of carbon in the world for the last century and has exported this tendency world wide.Boys and girls - you did this. The sky is orange because of things you did. Face it, front up and deal with it.

My guess is they are referring to NYC as center of capital markets.

This is going to sound brutal - but citizens of New York... if there is anyone in the world to blame for this, it is you...Sorry. I know that&#x27;s horrid. But it&#x27;s also true.

Average color of the NYC sky every 5 minutes