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Construction of the AITC

The Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics is constructing an Advanced Instrumentation and Technology Centre (AITC) to replace the Workshop facilities that were lost in the fires of January 2003. The AITC will replace our lost capabilities and provide us with enhanced facilities for the design and construction of instrumentation for the current and next generation of telescopes.

The last webcam image

The webcam was removed on the 10th of August 2006 so that the building it was mounted on could be restored (unfortunately, we can't show this work with the webcam). The AITC was almost complete and there were no more major external changes taking place.

A Hi-Res version is available (300Kb)

Movies of the AITC Construction

The following are downloadable time lapse movies generated from the webcam images.

Entire construction so far, 28 Oct 2004 - 10 Aug 2006(high quality, 32Mb) (low quality, 9.2Mb)

August 2006 (high quality, 4Mb) (low quality, 1.3Mb)

July 2006 (high quality, 14Mb) (low quality, 3.9Mb)

June 2006 (high quality, 13Mb) (low quality, 3.7Mb)

May 2006 (high quality, 14Mb) (low quality, 3.8Mb)

April 2006 (high quality, 14Mb) (low quality, 4.1Mb)

March 2006 (high quality, 14Mb) (low quality, 4.1Mb)

February 2006 (high quality, 12.6Mb) (low quality, 3.5Mb)

January 2006 (high quality, 13.9Mb) (low quality, 3.9Mb)

December 2005 (high quality, 13.5Mb) (low quality, 3.7Mb)

November 2005 (high quality, 13.9Mb) (low quality, 4.1Mb)

October 2005 (high quality, 14.6Mb) (low quality, 4.3Mb)

September 2005 (high quality, 13.9Mb) (low quality, 4.1Mb)

August 2005 (high quality, 14Mb) (low quality, 4Mb)

July 2005 (high quality, 13.9Mb) (low quality, 4.2Mb)

June 2005 (high quality, 13.9Mb) (low quality, 4.2Mb)

May 2005 (high quality, 13.9Mb) (low quality, 4.0Mb)

April 2005 (high quality, 14.1Mb) (low quality, 4.0Mb)

December 10 2004 - April 14 2006 Dead Camera - see below.

December 1-10 2004 (high quality, 3.2Mb) (low quality, 1.3Mb)

November 2004 (high quality, 13.8Mb) (low quality, 3.9Mb)

How to view the movies:
1. Right click on the link above.
2. Save the file on your local disk.
3. View the file with the appropriate software.

The movie files are DivX3 avi. They are best viewed using ...
i) Mac - Quicktime, with avi codec installed from DivX.
ii) Windows - Windows Media Player, with avi codec installed from DivX.
iii) Unix/Linux - mplayer from www.mplayerhq.hu. Once installed, type "gmplayer" to get the gui version of mplayer.

Stromlocam History

We'd like to thank Tim Wetherell, Martin Conway and the National Institute of Physical Sciences (NIPS) for their work in getting our webcam going.

NIPS is also sponsoring Tim Wetherell in the Stromlo Orrery Project.

The webcam was installed and took its first picture of the construction site on the 28th of October 2004.

On 8 December 2004, our original webcam was destroyed in a thunderstorm. This is the last picture it took.

We installed a new camera (with better isolation from lightning strikes we hope!) on 1 April 2005 and put the finishing touches to the set-up on 14 April 2005.

We turned the camer off on 10 August 2006