About Us

 Santa Barbara Skies started in April of 2001. It's based out of the Network and Multimedia Systems Lab at UC Santa Barbara. We had been thinking about doing this for a couple of years. Every morning, as we rode our bikes into the office, we looked out over the mountains and wished we had a camera to capture the sight. Our advisor, Kevin, finally offered to bring in his digital camera, and we decided it was time to share the view with the rest of the world.

The people currently involved in the project are:

If you enjoy the site and/or have any suggestions, please drop us a line. We'd appreciate hearing from you.

The Website

The website is almost completely automated using PHP server-side scripting. Of course, we still have people take the pictures and manually choose the shot for the day. Once the picture is ready, though, we upload it with a description of the scene and the system does the rest. A script that runs periodically scales and rotates the image appropriately, and places the files in the correct directories. The monthly calendars and the list of favorites are generated dynamically based on which photographs are available.

Equipment

 We started taking photographs with an Olympus C-3030. All of the pictures from April and May of 2001 were taken with this camera. It has a 3.3 megapixel resolution and a 3x optical zoom. About 100 pictures can fit on the 64MB smart-media card.

In June of 2001, I (Robert) purchased a new Canon Powershot S110. It has a lower resolution than the Olympus, only 2.1 megapixels. However, it has a more advanced auto-focus system that uses three separate points to determine the proper focus. Plus, it is quite a bit smaller and easier to carry around. This camera uses a 128MB compact-flash card that holds around 250 pictures.

We take all of our pictures in 1600x1200 (1024x768 prior to 01/18/02) JPEG format with super-fine resolution. We offload the pictures using a Unity Digital card reader which can access both the smart-media and the compact-flash much like a floppy drive. Then, we post the pictures to our web server along with a description of the scene. Finally, a script runs periodically which uses ImageMagik, a free image manipulation library, to scale the uploaded photographs into the three sizes that we use on our site: cover-page 400x300, full 720x540, and thumb-nail 85x63.

Current News
06/01/02 We're all gone for the summer, and interest has been waining. This may be the end of SB Skies. If we hear from you, we might start again in Fall.
04/02/02 Our anniversary. It's been a full year since we started collecting skies!
02/22/02 - 02/24/02 Just a quick trip to Lake Havasu on the Colorado River.
01/18/02 We increased the resolution of our originals from 1024x768 to 1600x1200. We also added a link to these originals for wallpaper fanatics.
12/08/01 - 12/14/01 We're on the road again. This time from Salt Lake City, Utah, the home of the 2002 Winter Games.
08/05/01 - 08/10/01 We'll be taking SB Skies on the road with a special series of skies from London, England.
06/14/01 - 06/30/01 We'll be taking SB Skies on the road with a special series of skies from Barcelona, Spain.
06/09/01 In preparation for our trip to Spain, we've bought a new digital camera (see above).
04/02/01 The world awaits the launch of Santa Barbara Skies. One day sooner and we'd have a complete month for the April calendar.
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