The New Zealand cameras worth opening in November, Mt Nicholas to Ruapehu
Mt Nicholas Station sits on the western shore of Lake Wakatipu, across the water from Queenstown, and it has a camera pointed back at the town. That camera published a new frame at 13:17 UTC today, which is 02:17 on 4 November where it stands, and the frame is black apart from the timestamp burnt into the top left corner. The one to open is the dawn frame. Sunrise at Queenstown on 2026-11-04 is 06:20 NZDT, 17:20 UTC on the 3rd, and the camera looks east across the lake into it. A second camera on the same site faces the other way, up the lake towards Glenorchy.
New Zealand is a small country with a lot of cameras on it. The New Zealand page listed 859 live ones when I loaded it at 13:09 UTC on 2026-11-03. Three of the networks behind them behave nothing like one another.
The aero club cameras, five minutes at a time
The Mt Nicholas pair belong to the AOPA NZ network, which publishes its frames at public.aopa.nz as an Apache directory listing. No map, no player, no page furniture. 54 jpgs and the time each one last changed.
That listing is the easiest refresh measurement on this site. I fetched it at 13:07 UTC and again at 13:17 UTC today: 24 of the 54 files had been replaced in between. The Queenstown and Wanaka files were stamped 13:10 on the first fetch and 13:15 on the second, five minutes apart to the second. mtnicqn.jpg went 13:07 to 13:17. Nothing in the listing is a stream, so a pilot on a phone in a hangar at Omaka pays for one image.
58 of them are live on the site this morning, counted from our own source table at 13:11 UTC on 2026-11-03, inside the 859. Five sit at Queenstown Airport, pointed at the Remarkables, Coronet Peak and Frankton Arm. Five more at Wanaka look at Treble Cone, the Cardrona valley, Hawea and Tarras. Four cover Rangiora from one mast, one sits at Haast Garage looking southwest at the pass road, and there are single views at Greymouth, Mosgiel and Richmond.
The Frankton Arm one is the surprise. At 02:08:38 NZDT this morning it showed the airport forecourt under sodium light, two empty bus shelters, a taxi rank with nothing in it, the tail-light smear of one car going round the roundabout, and the lights of Frankton strung along the far side of the arm. An airport at 2 a.m. is a quieter thing to watch than an airport at noon.
Three cameras that stop before sunset
The three on Mt John, above Lake Tekapo, are the odd ones. North, west and south last changed at 05:30, 05:29 and 05:22 UTC, ie 18:30, 18:29 and 18:22 NZDT on 3 November, and they had not moved by 13:17 UTC. Sunset at that spot was 20:28 NZDT, so they went quiet nearly two hours before dark while the rest of the network carried on through the night. I don't know why, and the frames give nothing away. Whatever the reason, the practical effect is that Mt John is an afternoon camera: open it before 18:00 NZDT, 05:00 UTC, and you get the Mackenzie basin in the long light.
Ruapehu from three sides
GeoNet runs the volcano cameras, and its camera page lists eleven views: Ruapehu from the north, east and south, Ngauruhoe, Tongariro and the Te Maari crater, Taranaki Maunga from New Plymouth, Whakatāne, Te Kaha and Raoul Island out in the Kermadecs. Ten of them are live here.
The north camera's frame carried a burnt-in stamp of 2026 Nov 04 02:10 am NZDT when I fetched it at 13:18 UTC, eight minutes old, which matches the ten-minute cadence we record for that source. Three sides of one mountain at ten-minute intervals is a decent cloud sensor: if two of the three are socked in and the third is clear, the weather is coming from a direction, and you can see which.
Ruapehu is at volcanic alert level 1 today, with a bulletin from 29 October reporting a slight increase in tremor and nothing else changed. That is the level it has sat at for a while. They are worth a look on a cold clear morning anyway, when any steam off the crater lake shows against the sky.
The road cameras, once a minute
The NZTA network is the big one: 245 live on the site this morning, from the same source table. Their frames come off trafficnz.info, and three different cameras I checked carried a last-modified time of 13:18:21 GMT, the same second, which reads to me like a one-minute national refresh.
The ones I would open are SH1 at Ngauranga Gorge, where Wellington's traffic funnels down to the harbour, the SH18 Upper Harbour Bridge in Auckland, and SH8 at Burkes Pass, the gate into the Mackenzie country on the way to Tekapo. New Zealand's morning rush is 07:00 to 09:00 NZDT, which is 18:00 to 20:00 UTC the day before, an easy time to catch from Europe.
One drive is covered at both ends and not in the middle. For the Milford road over the Homer Tunnel the nearest views are the Milford Sound entrance at one end and Te Anau airport at the other, with the climb to the tunnel between them.
The next thing I want to measure is the Mt John question. If I poll those three files every five minutes for a week I will know whether 18:30 is a daily cutoff or a one-off, and that answer changes what the site should say about them.