Taos Webcam

Hi..., I'm J. R. Ransom.

About the webcam
On September 26, 2003, I set up this webcam on the roof of the Historic El Torreon Hacienda in El Prado, NM just north of the Town of Taos, New Mexico USA. Favian Trujillo climbed up on the roof with me and attached the mounting for the camera's all-weather case. My grandson, Leo Bachand, helped me tweak the camera the night before we left for India. The next time I saw the online image from this cam was in Vrindavan India as we watched the sun rise in Taos before going to dinner. Since then tens of thousands of visitors have come to see Taos Mountain online on taoswebcam.com.

The constantly refreshed photograph of Sacred Taos Mountain on taoswebcam.com is a service of taosmultimediastudio.com, and our company, Taos Music & Art, Inc.. Network services to run this WebCam are provided by El Meze at El Torreon Hacienda, El Prado, NM.

Putting up this perfectly positioned webcam just seemed like such a great idea at the time. It has proven to be so. This webcam photo of Taos Mountain is a very popular online attraction. I've been told that many people use this webcam image as desktop pictures and screensavers.

From September 2003 Through July 2006, taoswebcam.com has received a total of 32,205 viewers for 75,791 Visits delivering 143,898 pages and 9.937, 231 hits. By Early September 2006 the Taos Mountain webcam photo had racked up over 10 Million hits.

We were very happy to be told that when our Taos Reserve Soldiers were stationed in Iraq, these webcam photos were a precious up to the minute link to Taos and the folks back home.

The camera is pointed at approximately 42º. That's North East. The approximate GPS coordinates for the Taos Mountain webcam are Latitude: 36.428395881274845 and Longitude: -105.57303428649902

taoswebcam.com uses a Stardot camera, which is actually a Linux computer with a lens and CCD.The camera runs a web server internally and sends a new photograph to the taoswebcam.com Web site every 15 seconds. Each new photo overwrites the previous photo. That's about 3500 new Taos Mountain photographs posted to the Web every day.

When it rains or snows the glass on the front of the webcam housing get rain-drops on it. Later they sometimes dry as spots. Getting to this webcam requires that somebody (mostly me) climb an extension ladder to the roof with some Windex and a paper towel. So..., sometimes you'll a slightly "dirty" image of sacred Taos Mountain. This can't be helped.

In September 2004, we had enough wind that a roof was blown off of the porch in front of Taos MultiMedia Studio. When the porch roof blew off it flew over the main roof and landed in the apple orchard on the northwest side of the building. On the way the pro-panel sliced the wire for the webcam. Frank V. came up to TMMS and spliced it back together. Then in the summer of 2006 we lost the memory module and the webcam had to go to California for repair. Now the webcam is back again.

In August 2008, the site was moved to servers at hostgator in Houston. In July 2009, my son, Ian, and I climbed back up onto the roof and installed a new high definition (HD) webcam. That larger image is now available on taoswebcam.com. With the new webcam, we used the 'stock' lens, but many of us feel that it was better with the narrower (more artistic) view. So, we plan to change the lens when possible. At the end of 2009, the taoswebcam.com site technology was upgraded to the very latest Joomla CMS technology by Taos MultiMedia Studio and moved to TMA's taosserver.com Web server for better performance.

Thanks for visiting taoswebcam.com
J. R. Ransom
President - Taos Music & Art, Inc.