In December 2010 I ran a pilot event in West Bromwich with Scott Farlow and the other bursary artists. This helped shape my plans for a public event substantially.

For the pilot, I timed the event by the phases of dawn twilight, of which there are three: Astronomical twilight, Nautical twilight, Civil twilight. (Twilight definitions – for dawn or dusk)

We met at 5:45am when it was still dark, walked around central West Bromwich together, and then returned to the Premier Inn and a top floor room with high windows forming an L-shape giving a views over almost an 180 panorama, looking out east towards Birmingham.

Having settled in the room around 6:20am we kept the lights off and the windows tilted open, to get as much of a sense of the outdoors as possible. As we would be spending the next 2 hours watching it made sense not to stay outside at temperatures around zero. I acted as host and talked about the stages of twilight, their timings, the way the are defined in terms of level of light. I also made tea and we had some shared food as we watched. We talked mostly about our observations of the changes outside…in the light, the sky, and in the activity around us in the city. Sunrise was at 7.54am and we stayed watching until around 8:30am.

I will post 16 images spanning the observation period, and go on to discuss my findings from the pilot in a separate blog post.