Ok, live webcam from Antarctica, NEW UPDATE

Did I see Kurt Russel?
Ok, could it be a satellite? Would it get that close? It looks as close like a plane might.
Anyone say what it is?

Originally posted by Just1Man
Let's hear it for Australian research. Lay off the Fosters

Hey lets not slag off australian research when you couldn't figure out that dome for yourself shall we.

Plus you forget that no Australians drink fosters, its just a scam to sell really crap beer to all you guys.

Also I believe I have discovered the reason for the Head Office wanting the camera moved, apparently there has been some pinching of beer going on at Mawson. Tthe camera has been moved to keep an eye on the beer storage container, along with the housing quarters of the prime suspects...


[edit on 6-6-2004 by Kano]

For anyone who's interested, I've put together a time-lapse quicktime movie of all the Mawson webcam images since the start of June. It includes the strange object in the sky we were all looking at before. The movie runs at 6 frames/second, so each second of screen-time represents 1 hour of Mawson-time.

I'm afraid the file is 68Mb, since I didn't want to compress out any details. You'll also need the latest version of Quicktime that will read Apple Pixlet format. I can put up other versions in the next day or two if people want though.. just let me know.

The link to the movie is below... hopefully.

I don't know if it will help to identify the strange light in the sky we saw, but it sure is pretty to look at anyway!!


enjoy! []

[edit on 16-6-2004 by muppet]

www.theblackvault has been taken away!!!
Where is it?

man too cool of you let me be the first to thank you and for anyone that doesnt know you can right click on da mouse and hit save target as. to save it to your machine.

Ok.. there might be a problem with the file somehow.. I've just fixed some permissions which might help. if it doesn't work.let me know and I'll try to find an alternative way of posting it....

Originally posted by muppet
Ok.. there might be a problem with the file somehow.. I've just fixed some permissions which might help. if it doesn't work.let me know and I'll try to find an alternative way of posting it....

Yup i got it to downl;oad half way then nada......

Blackvault is not there anymore, who knows why? A lot of things aren't where they were and those that are have become increasingly self-referential. I am becoming more disillusioned as every day passes with the whole internet experience anyway. I swear, if I get one one extra weird e-mail from the bloody twilight zone or where ever they come from, then I shall cast the cursed machine out the window and be done with it!

Linder, Oddfellow..

WTF are you on about?? Isn't this an Antarctica thread?

Linder and oddfellow you are in the wrong thread, this has NOTHING to do with blackvault, thanks,

I need the original Jpg images if anyone has them so i can email them to Mawson, I need them pretty soon so coould someone email them to

[email protected] if they have them thanks.

There are about 30 Jpgs in the full sequence. you can get them from the mawson site itself at these urls.

EDIT : PROBLEM WITH URLS... Im having another look now


Hopefully they might work for someone!

[] 6 days 68Mb
[] 4 hours 8Mb

PS. Can someone let me know if they DO manage to get this to work please?

[edit on 7-6-2004 by muppet]

[edit on 7-6-2004 by muppet]

[edit on 7-6-2004 by muppet]

[edit on 7-6-2004 by muppet]

[edit on 16-6-2004 by muppet]

Thanks muppet , If you check the webcam now Its extremely dark, They are being battered by one hell of a storm, ( Is that usual for antarctica) couldn't find any decent weather info, It looks very dark there!! Any weather experts here!

Mawson Webcam

It's about -13F with hurricane force winds.

Yeah....that's a big storm....

I'm just having a proper look now at the movie of stills from the webcam. We see the object in the sky go past twice, and can compare it to other stars/objects that go past as well. We can also see the sun pass over, so it should be easier to work out the direction. It looks as if we're facing north though, which is at odds with cmdrkeenkid's Sirius proposal..

the other odd thing to me is the object looks a funny shape, and there are other objects in the sky that follow a similar path which look more like regular stars..

What do astronomers think?

btw for those who had trouble downloading the the previous links, I've put copies of
the movie on my .mac iDisk

mawson_medium.mov (32 Mb)shows 2 days of footage
mawson_smaller.mov (8 Mb) shows 4 hours of footage, with only one pass of the object.

Both are Quicktime movies. Well worth grabbing the big one!!

it's been a while since anyone has posted on this, and i'd rather not see it die. has anything else happened with the webcam? i haven't been looking at it recently, and that file is too huge for me to download (i'm on dial up and can't stay on that long)

Me too.. I still want ot workl out what that thing was..

Mawson Webcam is still pointing at the ground... I wouldn't like to ask the poor chap to go out and move it in THAT weather though!!

Sorry about the large clip. I can put up some stills if you want though, or I could reduce the size of the movie file by droping frames, cropping it, scaling it or blacking out irrelevant parts... or I could put up stills.. any thing in particular useful to you?

I'm not sure if anyone knows about this, I'm sure some do:
www.isas.ac.jp...

ITOKAWA will gradually close to earth and, on June 26, 2004, it will be closest to earth with distance of 0.013AU (about 1.95 million km). But, unfortunately, it will be then located at the south hemisphere. It is estimated that the asteroid will become about twelfth magnitude (about 1,500 times brighter compared to the present).

So, it will be coming from the south, is there any reason to believe the measurements for the proximity could be off. If not, then this probably explains the paranoia...

The images are all stored on mawson in this format

www.aad.gov.au...

where M is mawson, 040601 is the date (june 1st 04), 0006 is the time (6 minutes past midnight), s.jpg

to add to the confusion, this the datestamp on the resulting image is 6 hours later than the file name indicates, so in the above example the image returned is stamped as 6:06am..

I'll work out a quick list of links that show the object.. plus another few interesting ones.

OK, these are the frames that show the object.. It looks an odd shape.. not quite round. I'm also pretty sure it's not the moon, since we can see on the movie that the ground shadows don't line up with it as it passes. We also see the moon's reflection on top of the dome, and from this it seems like it is higher in the skiy that the object we're looking at...

Anyway, here's the stills of the object..

www.aad.gov.au...
www.aad.gov.au...
www.aad.gov.au...
www.aad.gov.au...
www.aad.gov.au...
www.aad.gov.au...
www.aad.gov.au...
www.aad.gov.au...
www.aad.gov.au...
www.aad.gov.au...
www.aad.gov.au...
www.aad.gov.au...
www.aad.gov.au...
www.aad.gov.au...
www.aad.gov.au...
www.aad.gov.au...
www.aad.gov.au...
www.aad.gov.au...
www.aad.gov.au...

I can put up further links to other periods of time as well if people are interested..

Has anyone contacted the guy at Mawson with reference to the pictures so he could take a look at them?