The sun is our most precious resource. It's also a resource most of us take for granted.
4.6 billion years old, our sun has seeded our world with life by providing light and heat for everything
on Earth. Our sun also showers our world with bursts of color, day after day, year after year.
On Monday, October 3rd 2016, students from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Northwestern University
came together to record color and luminosity of the sunrise from five locations on the Chicago lake shore.
What you see here is a representation of what we saw that day.
Our sun is a modest one on the cosmic spectrum, smaller in size than most and about average in temperature.
The largest sun in our universe, Mu Cephei, is so large over
one billion of our suns would fit inside of it!
Mankind has recognized the sun as a provider of life for millennia. The Egyptians knew the sun as Ra, the
Hindus as Surya, and Amaterasu in the Shinto religion. Even cave drawings from many centuries prior to
these major religions depict the sun as the giver of life on this planet. All have recognized the importance
of our little star.
It is truly remarkable that the hottest object in our solar system is also responsible for providing a resource
for all life on Earth.
It is true that our sun bathes our planet in light. It also bathes our planet in color, whether the sun's
rays are simply reflecting off water or showering the poles with solar winds from millions of miles away.
Data plays an ever increasing role in our day to day lives. While we normally think of data as a byproduct
of the information age, data is also a means of communicating our perception of the world around us.
Each color you see here was recorded during a sunrise in the city of Chicago. These
colors have a story, a story art can effectively communicate.
Gray: Gray and grey are different spellings of the same word, and both are used throughout the
English-speaking world. But gray is more common in American English, while grey is more common in all the
other main varieties of English. In the U.K., for instance, grey appears about twenty times for every
instance of gray. In the U.S. the ratio is reversed. Both spellings, which have origins in the Old English
gray, have existed for hundreds of years. Grey gained ascendancy in all varieties of English in the early
18th century, but its dominance as the preferred form was checked when American writers adopted gray about
a century later. This change in American English came around 1825. Since then,
both forms have remained fairly common throughout the English-speaking world, but the favoring of gray in
the U.S. and grey everywhere else has remained consistent.
Light Corral: The variation of tones of the color coral are representation of colors derived from precious
corals. Coral was first recorded in 1513, variations such as Coral Pink and Light coral are part of this
family. Coral Pink, a pinkish color was first recorded in 1892.
Dark Salmon: In a RGB color space, Dark Salmon is composed of 93.7% red, 54.9% green and 49% blue.
Whereas in a CMYK color space, it is composed of 0% cyan, 41.4% magenta, 47.7% yellow and 6.3% black.
Salmon is a range of pale pinkish-orange to light pink colors, named after the color of salmon flesh.
The first recorded use of salmon as a color name in English was in 1776. Dark Salmon is a color that resembles
the color salmon, but is slightly darker.
Wheat (Beige): Beige is variously described as a pale sandy fawn color, a grayish tan, a light-grayish
yellowish brown, or a pale to grayish yellow. It takes its name from French, where the word originally
meant natural wool that has been neither bleached nor dyed, and hence also the color of natural wool.
It has come to be used to describe a variety of light tints chosen for their neutral or pale warm appearance.
Beige was used as a color term in the modern sense in France beginning approximately 1855-60; the writer
Edmond de Goncourt used it in the novel La Fille Elisa in 1877. The first recorded use of beige as a color
name in English was in 1887. Beginning in the 1920s, the meaning of beige expanded so that it is now also
used not only for pale yellowish-brown colors, but also for a wide range of pale brown and light brown shades.
Antique White: White is an achromatic color, a color without hue. Antique white is just that, with a
tendency toward a more beige and yellow tone. White is one of the most common colors in nature, the color
of sunlight, snow, milk, chalk, limestone and other common minerals. In many cultures white represents or
signifies purity, innocence, and light, and is the symbolic opposite of black, or darkness. According to
surveys in Europe and the United States, white is the color most often associated with perfection, the good,
honesty, cleanliness, the beginning, the new, neutrality, and exactitude.