Skyglass Camera

Skyglass reads the colour of the sky and gives it a name.

Point your phone upward and the wheel turns to meet the sky: a pale Frost Blue on a cold morning, Smalt after rain, Gull Wing on a day the clouds never lift. Press the shutter and that sky is kept, with the time and the place you saw it.

Inspired by the cyanometer, the ring of 52 painted blues Horace-Bénédict de Saussure carried up Mont Blanc in 1789 to measure the sky. Skyglass keeps his 52 steps and adds five more wheels for all the kinds of sky we see.

SIX WHEELS
• Pure, the classic cyanometer blues
• Green-blue, for lagoon light and hazy afternoons
• Violet-blue, for the last light before dark
• Amber and Gold, for dusk and dawn
• Storm grey, for weather

Each wheel has 52 named shades, 312 in all. Skyglass picks the wheel and the shade for you, live, as you look up.

IT KNOWS WHAT IS SKY
An on-device algorithm checks that you are actually pointing at the sky, so a wall, a screen or a coat never gets a name. The algorithm and the colour reading both run on your phone.

YOUR BLUES
Every capture lands in your timeline, day by day. Switch to Colours and they gather into piles, one for each shade you have found, so you can see which skies you keep meeting.

THE MAP
Your captures get pinned where you saw them. So you can collect skies all over the world.

SHARE A SKY
Each capture makes a card: the sky, its name, the time and place, and a little line of poetry. Send it to the person you thought of.