One of my favorite public Washington webcams is the NPS DC Air Quality Webcam installed in the Netherlands Carillon, facing towards the National Mall. It’s on a 15 minute refresh schedule, which gives you ninety-six unique images for every 24 hour period, so I wrote up a little script to fetch the webcam image every fifteen minutes from Monday to Friday, then combined the fetched images at the end of the week to make this little time lapse:

Turned out okay, though the final FLV from Google Video took a fairly large bit rate hit — I didn’t have jaggies like that in the original MP4 export. I’m looking forward to do more time lapses as the seasons change; anyone have suggestions for other such DC webcams I can fetch image sequences from on an automated schedule?

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

Paulo Ordoveza

Roving Asian mendicant, can occasionally be seen wandering the streets of downtown Washington, muttering unintelligible gibberish to passers-by while pushing a “bag lady” shopping cart full of old blankets, American flags, soda cans, and healthy secondhand snacks from organic food shop dumpsters. Used to live in a cardboard box at 16th and K but the rent was too expensive.