Africa’s best city : Cape Town. Image: Getty Images
Instagram-worthy: Cape Town has the bluest sky in Africa [photos]
Data scientists set out to discover which cities around the world have the bluest sky when Cape Town took the number one spot in Africa.
Africa’s best city : Cape Town. Image: Getty Images
Data scientists recently measured the bluest skies in the world… and Cape Town topped the list in Africa!
How to list the most Instagram-worthy skies in the world
Cape Town topped the list after the research group, S Money, gathered data using Google Street View to find photos of blue skies in major cities across the world. They then used ColorPick Eyedropper to rank the shades of blue by their hex code.
In order to rank the colours by blueness, they converted RGB codes to CIELAB, the colour space designed by the International Commission on Illustration to approximate human vision, which allowed them to isolate the amount of blue in each image.
The bluest skies in their study occurred across four continents. Their top ten includes nine capital cities from Asia, Europe, North America, and Oceania, plus San Francisco, the city with the bluest sky in the United States.
Seven of these cities are coastal, and four (Suva, Nassau, Helsinki, and Oslo) easily make the World Health Organisation (WHO) target for low air pollution. Heavy air pollution can turn the sky white or grey. However, it is not a hard-and-fast rule.
Which African city has the bluest sky?
Many factors affect sky ‘blueness’, including location, climate, time of day, and geography. However, in general, cities with lower air pollution and cities closer to the coast enjoy better blues. Cape Town’s Air Quality (AQI) of 11 gives it the healthiest air of any African capital, and the dividend is a beautiful coastal sky.
That’s why Cape Town took the number one spot, before Port Louis in Mauritius, Lilongwe in Malawi and Victoria in Seychelles. Windhoek in Namibia came in at number six, while Algiers in Algeria concluded the list.
Of the Mother City, the group suggests that the best way for people to experience Cape Town’s blue skies is to take a trip to Table Mountain.
“Cape Town gets more than its share of blueberry-pie-coloured views,” the group writes.
You can see the full list over here.
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