GeminiFocus 2018 Year in Review | Page 73

The timelapse videos from these cameras quickly became popular among staff on the mountain and the public alike. After a com- parative study of as many alternatives as we could manage, we decided to adopt the same technology for Gemini’s Base Facility Operations project. With a view to maximize coverage, we set up five cameras: one points up, three face a cardinal direction (covering north, west, and south) and one points to- wards Hilo (rather than due east, to better pick up approaching fog which often comes upon us from that direction). You can access the most recent 30 minutes of the cloud cams here. And the f/stoppers article is linked here (at the time of writing). All-night videos from the different cloud- cams are posted here. Finally, for a view of the southern sky from Gemini South, check the all-night archive here. These cameras are in use every night when we are open for observing, and provide ob- servers with the information they need. In addition, they also catch many interesting phenomena — natural and otherwise — and we fairly frequently receive requests for images when there has been, for example, extreme weather. Recently, fstoppers.com — a news site for photographers — ran an article with the byline “This May Be the Most Awesome Camera on the Internet”! January 2019 / 2018 Year in Review GeminiFocus 71