Tower Cam replaced

Night-time view from the new 'Tower Cam' 

Replacement camera that looks across peregrine falcon 
roosting and feeding points.

Recently we installed a replacement camera on top of Derby Cathedral's tower to watch where our peregrine falcons feed and roost. Finding a model small enough to fit through the 10cm high drainage hole in the Cathedral's stonework was a challenge. We hope you will agree the pictures it is producing are markedly better than before. They are clearer in daytime and under infra-red illumination at night are unrecognisable from our previous camera which had slowly deteriorated since installation back in 2008 when it gained the nick-name of "pudding cam". (Read more on that here)

Tower Cam (a.k.a. pudding cam) was first replaced in February, well in time to capture any mating sequences on the top of the tower (like this YouTube clip).  But we encountered various focussing issues and removed it immediately. For that reason our "quad view" page has contained a black section for much longer than we anticipated, which was frustrating to everyone.

View looking through the hole that leads 
to the external lead gutter (10cm clearance!)

Our new camera is an analogue dome camera ( QVIS 650TVL vari-focal 2.8-12mm) which, as before, is slotted through the projecting lead and stone drainage gutter on the top of the tower, allowing rainwater to pass beneath it. On its wooden mount, the camera is 10 cm in height, leaving us just 3 mm of clearance!

Nick Moyes (Project Technical Advisor)

All three camera views

Measuring up for a new camera - we have just 10 centimetres
of height to play with through our Cathedral's stonework. 
The wooden board is 12cm wide and sits within the lead guttering.