Foucault Pendulum
This is a Foucault pendulum in Kisgyor, Hungary. And what is a Foucault pendulum, you ask? It is essentially an experiment that demonstrates the rotation of the Earth. It is named after a French physicist, Léon Foucault. The first one was shown to the public in the Panthéon of Paris in 1851. A 28 kg ball was suspended from the top of the dome by a 67 meter wire. If you set the ball swinging back and forth, its inertia will essentially keep swinging back and forth in the same direction, even as the Earth rotates underneath it. You will find these pendulums in many science museums across the world.
August 11, 2014 at 5:23 pm | Cam Stills | No comment
MMT Observatory
The MMT Observatory in Tucson, Arizona is jointly operated by the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Arizona. It has a 6.5 meter telescope, which is the 14th largest in the world. The MMT is located on the summit of Mt. Hopkins at an altitude of 2616m. There are a few webcams related to the MMT, and some of them appear on Opentopia, or you can see them directly here.
August 7, 2014 at 11:10 pm | Cam Stills | No comment
Live from the pig pen
Animal cams are always fun. This one lets you watch the pigs in a community school in Saltash, Cornwall. Yes, a school that has pigs. According to this article, it used to be a pig named Dolores, which had piglets. I’m not sure if it is still her, as that was a number of years ago.
July 20, 2014 at 1:21 pm | Cam Stills | No comment
Meet Chip-Chan
This is one of the popular cams on Opentopia, Chip-Chan’s Apartment, and one that often gives rise to a lot of concerned discussion. It is looking into the apartment of Chip-Chan, a woman in her thirties who lives in South Korea. She spends most of her time in view of the cameras, sleeping or eating or on the computer. She sometimes does strange things like walking around in disguise or hanging up signs.
First of all, don’t worry, we’re not snooping on her against her will. She put up the cameras herself, and invites people to visit them, and the messages she hangs up are for the viewers. Not that it all makes a lot of sense, because she’s kind of crazy. It would probably be reasonable to say that she has a mental disorder. She believes that the police installed a chip in her ankle, which forces her to have a weird sleep schedule and do other strange things.
Chip-Chan is quite famous across the internets. People write blogs and wikis about her. She even writes several blogs herself. Here is one. She’s asking for help. Unfortunately it seems that nobody’s found a good way of helping her. And she’s asking that if one can’t help her, at least spread her story. Not that it helps very much, as it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
July 16, 2014 at 2:05 pm | Cam Stills | No comment
Manatees!
There are quite a few animal cams on Opentopia. Pet shops, bird nests, zoos. Like, how about these manatees. There are several, but the most famous one is named Snooty. You can also see the staff in scuba gear, maintaining the tank. This is at the Parker Manatee Aquarium in Saint Petersburg, Florida. Snooty is so famous that he has his own Wikipedia entry. He’s 65 years old, the oldest manatee in captivity, and one of the first recorded manatee births. Snooty is one of the few manatees that interacts with humans and he apparently still remember the voices of past trainers and the tricks they taught him.
July 14, 2014 at 2:01 pm | Cam Stills | No comment
What happened next?
Ironically, this cam, of a hairpin curve in Slovenia, stopped updating right after this picture. So we’ve been left wondering for weeks whether those cars managed to get out of each other’s way in time.
October 16, 2010 at 11:45 pm | Cam Stills | No comment