Wellington Harbour / Eastbourne / Lower Hutt / Petone

WebCam



Wellington Harbour, New Zealand



After 7 years in the same location overlooking the harbour and the city, beautiful as it was, it was time for a change, so the Wellington Harbour Webcam has been relocated to a new location and a different view. From here we now have a view to the South East of Petone, part of Lower Hutt, the Hutt rivermouth, Seaview, Point Howard, Eastbourne and the North Eastern quarter of the harbour, and part of Matiu / Somes Island. In the background distance you can see the Southern end of the Rimutaka Forest Park and the mountains above the Orongorongo valley. And in the foreground at the bottom left of the image is Maungaraki Primary School. The image should be updated every 5 minutes from early morning to just after sunset.

If the image hasn't changed since last time you were here, then try holding the shift key down while clicking on the "reload" or "refresh" button on your web browser. If that still doesn't work then it means that something has gone wrong with the automated upload, and I will try to fix it as soon as possible.

If you would like to view a list of recent images then please click here. If you have any comments or suggestions please fill in the feedback form.
Also, please take a look at the interesting images page to see some of the different moods of the harbour, last updated on October 28, 2004.

Enjoy.

Colin B

Number of visitors since October 29, 2000:
(Yay! It only took 7 years to get a million hits. Of course some other sites do that in a couple of days.)
Some additional information and history on the Wellington Harbour Webcam:

This webcam was originally set up back in 2000 a year or so after moving to this location and during the day, working in the city, I have mostly had only an uninspiring view of a neighbouring building to look at. I wanted to see what the day was looking like from my house. I had an old VHS video camera which had developed a nasty habit of chewing tapes, and was just sitting around collecting dust. So I put the camera on a tripod by the window and purchased a PC TV tuner / video capture card. The capture software that gets the image from the camera and uploads it onto this website is called VisionGS created by Sascha Keller who has been really helpful over the years in providing technical support and continual improvements to his software. It was 30 Euros well spent.

I'm not a web designer as you can probably tell from the very basic layout of this page. I really just needed some simple explanatory text to show what the page is for. I can't really be bothered with lots of fancy graphics and animations. I just created it using the HTML editor in the Mozilla suite.

The Wellington Harbour Webcam has been the longest running and most reliable Wellington based webcam on the net. At times when inclement weather has been a significantly disruptive feature in many peoples lives, like when storms or fog affect transport services like Toll's Interislander ferries and the airports and airlines, then the hit counter has reported notable increases in activity.

For many years the webcam was a completely ad-free community service, but recently I installed GoogleAds which hopefully have not been too intrusive for the viewers, and has provided some of you with useful links to relevant products and services.

Over the years I have received feedback from many enthusiastic viewers who have had various reasons for wanting to know what Wellington looks like at any given time. There have been amateur weather enthusiasts and professional meteorologists, backpackers, tourists, sailors, yacht clubs, water skiers, shipping and aviation enthusiasts, helicopter and airline pilots, property and real estate people, news media, school teachers and students, and even a retired American Navy serviceman who was last here in the 1950s and had some fond memories of this fine harbour and the friendly inhabitants of its town. But by far the most popular feedback has come from people who have at some time in their lives lived here and now find themselves in far flung countries with only their memories of this place. It seems the webcam has helped to bring back those memories for many people so that alone makes it worthwhile keeping it running. Sometime when I feel motivated, I'll set up a proper guest book to publish some of the nice things people have written to me via the feedback form.

Back in 2005 a news article was published in the Hutt News paper about the webcam. A copy of it has now been uploaded here.