How and Why we built it

Since this is a corporate webcam and the people visiting this page are mostly likely tech's so I will ramble on a bit, but first  First the techno mumbo jumbo!!!! We went thru many telescopes and lens combinations to get to this point what we have now is a 1200 mm by 200 mm diameter 8 inch Dobsonain mounted Newtonian reflector telescope with a 3X Barolo and a 19mm eye piece with a 1cm eye relief with an F-stop of 6, attached is a old  Connectix color Quick cam 2 which plugs in to a Linux web server appliance then of to a switched hub then a layer four switch and finally a dual processor DELL server to converts the Linux PPM image to a Jpeg for posting so IIS can serve the web page to you. A java applet controls the refresh rate at your end.  Well anyways the tower in the picture is  in a very isolated and hostile environment  the rim ice that sticks to the wind generators and solar cells is unbelievable. This shuts down all energy production making the tower rely on batteries for power . The web cam has had to be replace once, and gets bumped when the rime ice falls off , we will have this fixed soon. We had a mountain top anemometer but it kinda got destroyed . To remove the rime ice we have designed some thumpers that shake the poles there fixed to, they were on a timer but the timers failed so we will try a remote  control solution .  Looking down from the top to our office is about 3 kilometers. The nice thing about wireless is not having to deal with the local telco or compound any reliability problems with the last mile  that they provide. One of the unexpected benefits is that we have seen snowmobilers standing beside the tower talking on there cell phones and waving at the telecam 3 kilometers away TO FUNNY now this is tourism at its best.  ??This is it for now I will add more latter . see ya

PS:  Click Here To Read The APC Write Up on how we remotely control electronic equipment in the tower over a webpage and wireless link.