Latest sunset
West cam
The sky over Crockett
Loading the sun's position for the ranch
Presented by Mosley Ranch
7Sunset tonight at 7:42 pm
Loading the sun's position for the ranch
High cloud with dry air underneath. The kind that catches.
Scored from the cloud layers and humidity forecast for the sunset hour. Mid and high cloud light up; low cloud and haze put the fire out.
Computed from the sun's bearing at the horizon for this spot. Set the windmill bearings in the config once the cam is mounted.
A nudge when the light is about to be worth stepping outside for.
Texts and emails go out only on evenings that score 8 or better. A few a month, not every night.
Drag across the day. Until the cam is mounted, the frames come from the ranch's own archive, placed where the sun was when they were taken.
The colors of the strip are the sky itself, computed from the sun's height over the ranch for every minute of today. Once the cam is up, the strip is built from its own frames.
Twenty minutes after dark, the machine cuts tonight's sunset from the cam, stamps the score on it, and posts it here and to the ranch's pages. Same again an hour after sunrise. Nobody touches it.
365 sunsets. Every New Year's Day the machine cuts the year: one second per evening, date and score on every frame, six minutes long. Sponsors get it first.
A lightning sensor on the mast counts strikes out to twenty miles. Three in ten minutes and the page goes to storm mode. Half an hour of quiet and the clip is cut, the radar frames are stitched, and it posts here. Nobody touches a keyboard.
| Storm | Start | Length | Strikes | Peak / 5 min | Closest | Clip |
|---|
Strike positions come from the network feed; the sensor on the mast alone gives distance, drawn as rings. Radar tiles by RainViewer. Sample archive until the sensor is up.
The best frame from every sunrise and sunset, kept forever. Free to download for your own wall. Tap one to see it big.
Reels stitched from the ranch's own photos, until the cam takes over and the machines fill this page on their own.
No pop-ups, nothing over the picture, nothing that moves. A cream tile with your name on it, on a page people leave open all evening.
Storm season and Sunset of the Week carry their own presenting sponsor. Every sponsor gets a monthly one-page report: how many people saw the tile, how many tapped it, and which clips brought them in.
Mosley Ranch sits on a ridge near Crockett, in Houston County, Texas. The old windmill on the ridge has watched more sunsets than anyone on the place, so we put a camera on it. It looks west across the pasture toward Leon County, which is where the weather comes from, and it shows the sky and the horizon line, nothing else.
The windmill stands on a ridge west of Crockett, beside the old route of El Camino Real de los Tejas. Travelers have crossed this ground for three hundred years, and four or five homestead sites are still readable on the ridge. We have started writing its history.
Open the history and map room