Isle Royale Forums

Looking for opinions on the webcam images. The current webcams have good low light performance and the ability to use very long shutter times with lots of gain. This makes images at night appear unnaturally bright... almost like daylight if there is a good moon. Upside of that is you can often see things at nights, and lights on distant shores, ships, aurora, etc all will be visible to one degree or another. Downside? maybe is that the images do not appear as things would to the human eye.

Is this desirable or would you prefer to see essentially nothing at night but natural darkness?

I think it's great just having the webcams at all! Either works for me, is there a sweet spot in between?

The BLUE sky at NIGHT was my biggest WTH moment when the latest cameras were installed. Who new at full moon with fairly clear skies, the normal blue tint would appear?

I love new the much higher sensitivity. I already know what EVERYTHING looks like in the dark, but the ability to SEE in the dark (ok, low light) is great.

I DO have suggestions/complaints with the 4 Ojibway cameras. Mostly, it boils down to their calibration. All but the Middle Island camera are actually quite nice. The MI one looks like maybe it was never calibrated. Ideally, all four would all have the appropriate settings so pictures taken at similar times returned by each would look correct. Also, the NE camera seems to switch into B&W mode sooner than the others. And of course a much greater refresh rate would be great but available bandwidth and available solar power are saved for discussions another day.

I've never seen this camera before. Can you share the link?

Link to the camera not on the website I inadvertently used as an example: https://www.nps.gov/webcams-isro/mottsw.jpg
Our website managers are seasonal and currently not at work. Once they get back after New Years, I suspect they will be updating the website to include this view. In the meantime, you can access it directly with the link.

Good feedback on calibration and getting the cameras to act more similarly with regards to when they switch from black and white to color, etc. I'll see what can be done there, but honestly it's probably going to wait until we're back out on the island this Spring.. I'm pretty nervous to be making configuration changes without the ability to get hands on for several months to reset things if something goes sideways. We have fairly limited bandwidth and tweaking the cameras over the remote connection can be problematic.

You are correct that the refresh rate for images is limited by available bandwidth. We're trying to balance costs of operation against everyone's (NPS staff included) desire for more. Priority this past year has been to get the cameras running more consistently through the Winter which was a power limitation.. With power upgrades made over the past season, we're on track for 24/7 images the majority of the Winter rather than the few shots a day we've historically done. We have some pretty decent telemetry in place to monitor the power systems and we're doing OK so far, but I do expect a few outages in December and January, weather dependent. Will evaluate costs and consider an increase in bandwidth this Spring. I suspect we will never be "done" with tweaks and improvements, but will continue doing what we can to make incremental improvements as we can with the resources and time available.

+1 for seeing at night!

Another +1 - I like the higher gain that makes night shots much clearer and more interesting.

+1 for seeing at night. It'd be great to catch the northern lights

fonixmunkee wrote: ↑Sun Dec 17, 2023 7:29 pmIt'd be great to catch the northern lights

Like this one from last Thursday?

Purely by chance, I checked the IR webcams yesterday evening and caught this moonrise.