Night Run through the Houston Ship Channel

This is a stunning video of a 600 foot long ship moving through the Houston Ship Channel at night. It was made by Louis Vest ("OneEighteen" on Flikr here). Here's his description "... 2000 still images taken by using a Nikon D700 in the "interval timer" mode. 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 first half begins just below the Port of Houston Authority Turning Basin (the very end of the channel) and continues down to Green's Bayou. The second half takes us from there to Morgan's Point at 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." (Note that this version of the video has both halves combined).

I grew up not far from this area and I clearly remember how incredible the industrial area is around the ship channel. For probably 20 miles East-West and 50 miles North -South there is nothing but one large industrial plant after another. I've never seen it like this though - at night and from a ship's deck. It really makes a beautiful video. Watching this in HD on fullscreen is great (and oddly calming).