“Remember that when the shuttle Columbia went down that there were a small handful of screencaps of weather radars showing the shuttle’s ionized trail?”
Or the fact that we have two (so far) video clips of the plane going down in the Hudson last week. Security cameras are typically not high end quality, yet we can clearly identify the plane and it’s water landing.
And how many webcams are there? I had someone say that they’re not aimed towards the horizon, but what about all those “weathercams” the TV stations set up on top of their respective city skyscrapers? How about web cams at amusement parks and those that overlook a city skyline?
Like you said, there’s no expectation of high quality, but there’s none to be had from the kooks either. ;)