Birthday Boy Benedict XVI is in town, on the first papal visit to the United States Washington, DC since John Paul II came in 1979. Barricades lined Pennsylvania Ave in Foggy Bottom this morning, where the Popemobile would pass after a welcome at the White House:

Myself, I haven’t seen a Pope since the last time I was Roman Catholic: World Youth Day 1995. I considered taking lunch off to try and see Benedict, but busy meeting schedules intervened, so I decided to try the next best thing: fetching images from public DC traffic webcams on the internet and turning them into a Popemobile time lapse video!

Traffic camera images courtesy Trafficland, fetched every ten seconds with wget and assembled in Windows Movie Maker. I kept wget running for a bit longer after the Pope passed because I was away from the computer, so you can see a lot of the post-Papal scene as well — police personnel congregating, crowd dissipating, barricade segments being moved around, traffic flow starting up again, that kind of thing. I decided to keep it in for those who might be interested.

(If you enjoyed this, you might also enjoy SuperPope!)