Hawaii's Kilauea Volcano has a summit lava lake ("vent"); it's at the highest level since the eruption began and is about to overflow the lake walls...so I made an automatically updated GIF from the newest images from the USGS HVO webcam at so my volcanophile wife can watch it happening in real time.

(May 4, 2015) The vent overflowed this last week many times, as the caldera continued to inflate. Here's hoping it spectaularly but safely fills Halema'uma'u crater!

(April 26, 2015) The lava lake is roughly 530 feet wide, so kind of guesstimating at the moment from the 00:56:07 image from the overlook webcam today I'd say the lava is about 10 feet from the top of the lake walls.

You can get to the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory Web Cams at http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/cams/.

The current update from HVO on Kilauea is at http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/activity/kilaueastatus.php.

(For nerds: I fetch the images from the USGS when they change using wget , and then convert them to an animated gif using ImageMagick's convert tool. Only the last 30 images are used. USGS only uploads a new image a few times an hour, which is why the GIF is not smooth and updates so infrequently.)

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