Circle Sky
20 April 2026 · 11:36 · Canterbury City Centre, Kent
The technique is called stereographic projection, and it has a longer history than the smartphone apps that now perform it in a single tap. The Swiss geologist Horace Bénédict de Saussure used a version of it in 1776, commissioning a panoramic illustration from the summit of Mont Buet in which the draughtsman stood at the centre of the scene and rotated through a full revolution, drawing the horizon as a circle rather than a straight line. The resulting image placed the viewer at the centre of the Alpine landscape rather than outside it, looking in. The same mathematical principle — mapping a spherical field of view onto a flat plane by collapsing the horizon inward — is what the Tiny Planet app applies to a phone photograph. De Saussure would presumably have found the results recognisable.
This one was taken from an upstairs window at work in Canterbury on a Monday morning in April, looking south-east towards the cathedral. The day was changeable in the way that April sometimes insists on being — bright intervals giving way to heavy cloud, the light shifting faster than you could reliably plan for. The Tiny Planet transformation folds the street-level scene inward so that the ground becomes a sphere hovering at the centre of the frame, ringed by the swirling cloud that was moving through at the time. Cars and vans in the yard below curve into the globe; the trees in their early April leaf bend around its surface; and at the upper right of the sphere, unmistakably, the pinnacles of Bell Harry Tower break out of the curve.
Bell Harry is the central tower of Canterbury Cathedral, designed by the mason John Wastell and completed in 1498, standing 250 feet to the tops of its pinnacles. It is visible from much of the city and from a considerable distance beyond it. In the Tiny Planet projection, it appears at roughly the one o'clock position on the sphere's rim, its tracery compressed and angled by the transformation but still legible as the thing it is. The cloud beyond it — which, in the original photograph, would have been an ordinary backdrop — has been drawn into a vortex that wraps around the outer edge of the frame, giving the whole image the appearance of a weather system photographed from some considerable altitude.
Apple iPhone 14 Pro Max · 6.86mm · f/1.78 · 1/15000s · ISO 100 · Processed in Tiny Planet
