Sunday, September 9, 2012

Night run on the Houston Ship Channel


A time lapse video assembled in Quicktime from 2000 still images in the "interval timer" mode taken by Louis Vest, ship pilot in Houston, Texas.
The camera was fastened to an outside rail and set to take a photo every six seconds.
Quicktime then assembled the photos into a .mov file that plays back at 12 frames per second.
So, one minute of movie time represents 72 minutes of trip time on the channel.

The video begins just below the Port of Houston Authority Turning Basin (the very end of the channel) and continues down to the head of Galveston Bay.
From there we still have 31.5 miles of channel across the bay to the pilot station outside the Galveston jetties.
Houston is the busiest port in the US for ship traffic.

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It looks incredibly fast, but we were actually only making 5-6 knots in the first half and no more than 10 knots in the open areas of the second half.
This was a Panamax ship, 106 feet wide, and about 600 feet long with 32 feet of draft.

 
Night Run III

This other sequence begins at Morgan's Point at the head of Galveston Bay, about 30 miles from the sea.
The trip continues for another 22 miles to the Port of Houston Turning Basin about three hours later - three minutes in this video.

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