Ken Murphy, a self described "musician, programmer, artist, and tinkerer" who works for KQED public radio, installed a camera on the roof of San Francisco's Exploratorium museum. For a full year, the camera would take a picture of the sky once every ten seconds. The four-megapixel camera was positioned at a 45-degree angle on the museum's roof with the lens facing to the north so the sun would not wash out the images.
Murphy made separate time-lapse movies out of each day's images, then arranging those into a 360-pane, chronologically synced mosaic. The final product, which he calls "a dynamic time-lapse visualization of the sky for an entire year," shows the same slice of sky on different days in a single view. He ended up using only 360 images for the sake of making the final product a clean rectangle.
Murphy explains the project on his website:
Time-lapse movies are compelling because they give us a glimpse of events that are continually occurring around us, but at a rate normally far too slow to for us to observe directly. A History of the Sky enables the viewer to appreciate the rhythms of weather, the lengthening and shortening of days, and other atmospheric events on an immediate aesthetic level: the clouds, fog, wind, and rain form a rich visual texture, and sunrises and sunsets cascade across the screen.
Another time-lapse look at the world was recently put together by artist Michael König using NASA images taken by the International Space Station.
Watch the video at the top and be sure to keep an eye on the running clock in the bottom right corner. Murphy recommends viewing it in full screen and at the highest possible resolution.