A Year of Skies
Paper / A4
£29.00
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A Year of Skies
£29.00
Print only, frame not included. UK delivery usually 4 to 8 working days.
A whole year above one place, every hour of it, in the colour of its sky.
The year
A whole year, from 1940 to last year.
The place
The town, then the county or country. We print exactly the place you give.
Title (optional)
Ideas: Our first year in Leith, The year you arrived, Skies over Kyoto
What you get: An unframed print on heavyweight 240 gsm matte fine art paper, A4 (210 x 297 mm), A3 (297 x 420 mm) or A2 (420 x 594 mm), usually sent rolled in a tube. Made to order for you. You give the place, the year and a title. Every hour of that year as the colour of its sky, in the place's own time. Under it: the longest and shortest days, the clearest month, and about how much rain fell. The preview on this page shows your words, dates and layout; where it is marked sample weather, the weather drawn in it is an example until we make your print.
Night, twilight, the gold of a low sun and the blue of day, clouded as the cloud was and darkened where it rained. The daylight draws an hourglass whose shape belongs to your place: wide in summer, pinched in winter, upside down south of the equator. Near the poles it becomes a band of polar night and a summer with no night at all.
- Days run left to right, midnight to midnight top to bottom, in local time
- Under the picture: the longest and shortest days, the clearest month, and about how much rain fell
- Anywhere in the world, any whole year from 1940
Made just for you, so it cannot be returned for a change of mind, or cancelled once we have started making it (contact us straight away if you need to). If it arrives faulty or damaged, we will replace it or refund you in full.
Where the weather comes from
The weather is ERA5, a reanalysis from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. It estimates the weather for squares about 28 km across, so it describes the area around your place, not one garden. Dates before about 1950, and places far from weather stations, rest mostly on the model with few observations behind them. The examples are real years at real places: Edinburgh, Kyoto, Mumbai, Lisbon, Cape Town and Tromsø. Data: ERA5, ECMWF (Copernicus Climate Change Service), CC BY 4.0. Credits are printed on every sheet.
Print details and delivery
- Sizes: A4 (210 x 297 mm), A3 (297 x 420 mm), A2 (420 x 594 mm).
- Paper: heavyweight matte fine art paper (240 gsm), bright white, smooth with a fine grain.
- Inks: giclée printing in pigment-based archival inks.
- Printed to the edge of the sheet, with no border added. Each design keeps its own margin, so nothing important sits near the trim.
- Unframed, and usually sent rolled in a tube.
- Delivery: most UK orders arrive in 4 to 8 working days (1 to 4 days to print, then 2 to 3 days by courier). See the shipping page.
- Colours differ a little between a screen and paper.