Introducing The Skylight Project

During each day of 2011 this blog featured an image taken on (or around – if we’re being transparently honest here) that day. This is a project that I want to continue into 2012, because I found I enjoyed doing it. But I’m introducing a few refinements for this year.

Enter The Skylight Project. Because a large number of 2011’s images featured dramatic East Anglian sunsets shot from an upstairs roof window, I thought it would be interesting to chronicle what the sky looks like from that window throughout that year.

The Skylight Project skylight

The Skylight Project skylight

Or mostly from that window – since the sky is big and ubiquitous and I’m not committing to spending the next 365 days in the same place. Also, I might still add the occasional Daily Photo if I’ve taken a good one that day.

In order to kick things off in style, today’s sky was naturally almost entirely grey and featureless. But there is an element of documentary to this project, and the necessity to work with what’s there, so here’s a photo of it anyway:

Silver-grey cloudy sky on first day of year

And here’s an additional image with very slightly more drama – the control tower at Luton Airport and a plane that’s just left the runway (which, thankfully, I can’t see from any upstairs window). A good metaphor for the launch of a new project, I felt:
Jet taking off at Luton Airport

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific — and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise —
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
John Keats – On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer