There was a bug in the system that prevented people from taking photos of Pacific Dawn. I’ve fixed that bug, so you should be able to take photos now.
Unfortunately, I’m finding it difficult to get any reliable location info feeds for Pacific Dawn, so until I do that, the only photos that can get uploaded are those you take manually.
Shipwatcher now lets you search for ships that are close to either Sunrise, Sunset, Noon or Midnight.
It also lets you show the most popular, and least popular ships.
The info is based on the latest position report of the ship. Some ships don’t give position reports very frequently, so they won’t be included in the search.
This should make it easier for you to quickly pick bridgecams that contain interesting content.
It’s also more fun!
Enjoy.
Neil
Technical info:
The search will exclude any position reports more than 4 days old.
If a ship is moving easterly or westerly, and its last report is 4 days old, the sunrise / sunset queries could have a margin of error of between 1 and 2 hours.
Usually this is only a problem for “Sunrise” queries where the ship is sailing west, or “Sunset” where the ship is sailing east, as in these situations, the ship will still be in darkness.
Allow a margin of error of almost 25 minutes per day based on the age of the location report. So if a report is two days old, the sunrise / sunset times will be out by almost an hour.
Ships travelling North / South won’t experience such a large margin of error.
I installed a Turbo Charger into ShipWatcher today.
It now runs much faster.
(Well actually, I just rewrote part of it to run faster. But “Turbo Charger” sounds better 🙂 )
I’ve added twelve ships from Norwegian Cruise Line to ShipWatcher.
Enjoy!
There’s a new “Preferences” button on the ShipWatcher page.
I had to do this, because I am continually adding more ships, and wanted an easy way for you to be able to control each ship that you see.
The “Preferences” page shows you all available ships, and lets you tick the ones you want to see. ShipWatcher will remember your preferences for next time.
I’ve added Carnival Cruise Lines to Shipwatcher.
Although they have a lot of ships, I’ve only found 3 of them with webcams. The good news is that they have cameras fore and aft, so you can get a couple of views for each vessel.
Click on the “Preferences” button to select which ships you want to see.
Former Princess ship “Regal Princess” is being renamed “Pacific Dawn” and will now be part of the P&O Australia fleet.
Her webcam is online again, so I have updated the website to reflect these changes.
I am not getting any position reports for her at the moment. If anyone out there knows if her callsign has changed, please let me know.
The locations of Costa ships weren’t showing up properly.
I’ve fixed the bug, so you should now be getting up to date locations for all Costa ships.
By the way, if any of the information looks wrong, please let me know and I’ll get onto it right away.
I’m planning to add a lot more cruise lines to ShipWatcher soon.
So I made some minor changes to the website to make it load faster.
The main difference you will notice is that you now have to actually click on the 
(info) icon to show info about the ship. Previously you could just hold your mouse over it to show the info, but that doubled the amount of data we had to transmit.
Reducing the amount of data we transmit makes the website load faster.
Please let me know if this adversely affects you in any way. I’d like to keep ShipWatcher fun for everyone, so I don’t want minor changes that I make to detract from that!
Also, if you have any suggestions, please let me know. Just click on the “Comments” link at the bottom of this message.
I’ve added Costa Cruises to ShipWatcher. Their ships have bridge and stern (front and back) webcams. So if you select Costa ships, you’ll see two cams for each ship – one for the bow and one for the stern.
The feed from the Costa website is slower than the other sites. I’m sorry about this but there’s nothing I can do about it. I have no direct link to raw data from the webcams like for Princess and P&O, which means all data from Costa webcams needs to be handled twice – once by our server and once by your browser. If you don’t like the delays for the Costa pictures, just don’t tick the Costa box on the company filter at the top right of the page. But it’s worth the delay – I love the view of the ships wake from the aft cruiisecams.
I’ve also added an approximate location to all ships, so that you can get an idea of the ships location as at the time of its most recent location report. If you hold your mouse over the blue “i” icon, you can see the new “Approximate Location” entry for the ship. It reports on the closest official port to the ship. If you want to know the mathematics behind this, please let me know 🙂
Oh – one more thing, there are now 50 cruisecams online. To reduce the amount of time it takes to load the page, Costa is turned off by default. If you want to see Costa ships you need to tick the box on the top right of the screen. After you do this the first time, ShipWatcher will remember your preferences next time you visit.
If you have any advice on how I can improve ShipWatcher, please let me know.
Best wishes
Neil
P.S. You might be interested to know there are over 8,000 official ports in the ShipWatcher database. Initially, I had over 2.6 million towns and localities. I intended to tell you how far the ship was from the nearest town. The problem was that with so many cities, it took ages (over a minute) to compare the latitude / longitude of each city with that of the ship. It’s much quicker (less than a second) to do a scan on all 8,000 ports instead.
Besides, cruise ships will never visit places like Alice Springs, Ulan Bator, Vienna, Salt Lake City, Asuncion, or Moscow because they’re miles from the sea. 🙂
“The Alice Springs Cruise Terminal” – now that rings a bell…
