The nine Kīlauea cameras, and which one to watch when

At 15:10 HST on 2026-10-07 about a dozen people were standing at the railing on Uēkahuna bluff, looking south across Kaluapele at the gas coming off Halemaʻumaʻu, and the camera above them was pointed at the same view. That is K2cam, and it is the only camera on the volcano with people in the frame. You get the overlook, the paved path, a bare ʻōhiʻa leaning off the cliff edge, the caldera behind it and Mauna Loa's long shoulder on the right horizon. Open that one first. It is the only feed that tells you what it is actually like up there, which on the afternoon of the 7th was grey, breezy and busy.

The rest are not nine angles on one picture. Each was put where it is to answer a different question, and once you know which is which you stop refreshing the wrong one.

The two that show you the whole crater

B1cam sits on the east rim with a fisheye lens, and at 15:10:01 HST it had the entire floor of Halemaʻumaʻu in one frame: black new lava from edge to edge, a fat white plume leaning away from vents at the far left, thin wisps rising all along the opposite wall, Mauna Loa flat across the skyline. This is the establishing shot. If something has changed overnight, B1cam is where you notice it.

KWcam does the same job from the opposite rim, looking southeast, and at the same minute it was half-filled by a plume climbing the right side of the shot with the rim rubble in the foreground. Two cameras, one crater, opposite corners. When the wind is blowing the gas across one of them, the other is usually clear, which is the entire reason to know both.

The three pointed at the vents themselves

V3cam is the close one. On the south rim, zoomed in, and at 15:09:01 it held a spatter cone just right of centre with gas lifting off its mouth, ropey pāhoehoe filling the whole bottom half of the frame, and the plume washing out everything above the skyline.

V2cam takes the same vent from the northeast and further back, so you get the cone, the pale new shield it has built around itself, and a row of steam puffing out of cracks along the bottom edge of the picture. S2cam is a different make of camera altogether and it tells on itself in a status bar across the bottom of every frame: camera id, a preset number, and the air temperature, which read 079°F at 15:01:04. I like that one a lot. A camera that reports the weather at its own tripod is doing more work than a camera that just sends a picture.

The one that works when the others cannot see

At 15:09:01 on the 7th, V1cam on the northwest rim returned a frame that was almost entirely pale grey. Gas and cloud, wall to wall, with a corner of dark rock at top right and a hint of crater floor along the bottom.

Forty-four seconds earlier, F1cam on the same rim returned a thermal image of the crater floor with a temperature scale printed up the right-hand edge running from about 15 to 110 °C. The floor came out magenta, the cracks came out in bright yellow lines, and two points near the top right were white. USGS says plainly on its own camera page that thermal cameras see heat rather than light and get better views through volcanic gas, and that is the single most useful fact about watching this volcano. When the visible cameras go flat grey, F1cam is still reading the floor. Pair them. If V1cam is white, open F1cam and you will still know where the hot ground is.

When to actually look

Every image on these cameras is a ten minute snapshot, not video. I watched V3cam's file on 2026-10-08 go from a Last-Modified of 01:09:02 UTC to 01:19:02 UTC, which is ten minutes to the second. B1cam went 01:10:12 to 01:20:06 across the same stretch and K2cam 01:10:13 to 01:20:07, so the whole set runs on one ten minute clock with the cameras offset about a minute from each other. USGS puts it as "a snapshot every few minutes to conserve bandwidth", and three cameras, V1, V2 and V3, also carry a continuous YouTube stream if you want motion instead of stills.

Night is the interesting shift, and Hawaii is ten hours behind UTC, so the summit is dark roughly from 04:30 to 16:00 UTC. HVO's daily update on 2026-10-07 at 09:03 HST reported both the north and south vents erupting minor spatter overnight with strong glow and flaming, the alert level at WATCH and the aviation colour code ORANGE. That glow is a night thing. In daylight the same vent is the undramatic grey cone in V3cam's frame; after dark it is orange. The eruption has been running in episodes since 2024-12-23, the most recent being episode 54 on 2026-08-25, and between episodes the summit still puts out between 1,000 and 5,000 tonnes of sulphur dioxide a day.

Off the summit

KPcam stands down on the Mauna Loa Strip Road and exists to document plumes against open sky. At 15:10:01 on the 7th it showed scrub forest, a flat horizon and a lot of cloud, which is what a quiet day looks like from there.

Further out, Maunaulu and the two Puʻu ʻŌʻō cameras still refresh on the same ten minute clock. The Puʻu ʻŌʻō west flank frame at 15:00:02 on the 7th was a rain-dark plain of old lava under low cloud with nothing moving on it, which is the honest state of the east rift zone and has been since the vent went quiet. The cameras are still there and still pointed at it. If you want something to happen, the whole story is at the summit.

One thing that is worth knowing before you go hunting: every Kīlauea camera anybody publishes is a USGS one. The National Park Service page says so in as many words, "All webcams are courtesy USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory", and the image files it serves are the same volcanoes.usgs.gov files. So you are choosing a viewpoint, never a provider.

What we are doing with these

We are going to put the HVO camera code on each of our pages. Right now you can read a USGS update that says "V3cam shows the south vent", come to our Kīlauea page and have to work out which of the views that is, and there is no reason for that to take more than a glance. The codes are published, short and stable.

The thing I have not worked out is F1cam. Its temperature scale is the data, not decoration, and we currently serve it as though it were a photograph like any other. A thermal frame without its colour bar is a pretty picture of nothing in particular. I would like to know how other directories handle that, because I do not have a good answer yet.