The Lee Vining WebCam is located in the attic of the Mono Lake Committee
Information Center and Bookstore in the center of Lee Vining. The camera looks northeast
out of an attic vent across Highway 395 to Mono Lake. The camera--a home video camera--was
kindly donated by Sally Barngrove and Tom Gertmenian, of Pasadena. A video
cable runs from the camera to the Committee's communications office, where
it goes into a Snappy video capture device connected to the parallel port of
our email computer. The camera is powered through a battery backup which saves us a trip to the attic to turn the
camera back on every time the power fails in the Information Center. We use the excellent Webcam32 software to capture images from the
camera using the Snappy interface. Images are grabbed every
five minutes and uploaded
to our web site.
The Mono Lake WebCam was replaced on December 8, 2005,
with a StarDot Technologies
Netcam. The image quality, reliability, and ease of use are much better than
the old setup. Unfortunately, it only archives 10 images, and we can't
specify that we want to keep 1 per hour for 12 hours like we do with the Lee
Vining WebCam. So we now have 10 images 15 minutes apart (2.5 hour history),
and hopefully the improvements make up for the lack of a 12-hour history.
If you have any suggestions for the Mono Lake WebCams, please feel free to
contact us!
