Last night I logged on to NASA’s Mauna Kea observatory live video feed to watch LCROSS slam into the moon. After LCROSS was finished pancaking into the moon and not producing the expected 6 mile plume, I noticed an IP address flash on the top right of the video display. So I hit it with a web browser. I found this:

The big green button was begging to be hit, so I did. And up came a directory:

So I made a call and holy crap the video feed for Mauna Kea stopped and switched to the call I was busy making.

So I called “Bob’s Office” and watched Bob at his desk for a while, then I called something else and these guys showed up on the feed:

At at this point sanity took over and I realized I’m controlling a federal government video feed that probably still has a few hundred people logged on. So I Googled around for as many email addresses as I could find at AMES Research Center (@mail.arc.nasa.gov) and emailed them to let them know about their open feed. Of course NASA engineers are very busy and probably speak in formulas anyway, so they didn’t reply. But today thankfully the feed is password protected.