The Sun Always

Watch the sun rise and set across the world.

This little Flask app grew from a fascination with the app Periscope: that you could be present in your own life, in your own dorm room at midnight working on problem sets, and at the same moment be watching someone else live-streaming their morning commute through Rome.

We wanted to gain access to tidbits of other lives. We liked the idea of tracking the sunrise and sunset, both because they are cyclical processes that sweep the whole world and because they are both mundane and extraordinary. People will pull out their phones to stream a beautiful sunset, no matter how many we’ve seen before.

The app works by using the Twitter API to search for tweets that contain Periscope links as well as “sunrise” or “sunset” keywords, and sorting them to find the most recent stream. Potential future improvements: update the search query to include the words for sunrise and sunset translated into many languages, as well as certain key emoji. 🌅🌄