As the Las Conchas Fire made its most threatening swipe at Los Alamos National Laboratory, administrators there deployed homegrown aerial surveillance technology known as Angel Fire to take both a wider and closer view of the situation.

The project was intended to give thousands of evacuated residents reliable visual information on their homes and residences and to share with the public a detailed picture of the contours of the fire.

"Users went wild," said Stephen Suddarth, one of the developers of Angel Fire and director of Transparent Sky, the company that donated the equipment and time for the flights. "There were 34,000 hits in the first hour."

As of Tuesday, lab officials had recorded 1.1 million clicks on and within the website. LANL put the site together quickly with returning evacuees in mind. Included are panoramic swatches that can be magnified to a scale at which people and cars are visible, should there be any in the abandoned landscape.

There also are photos from June 30 and July 1 that show views of the main ruins at Bandelier National Monument, critical LANL facilities and sections of Los Alamos County.

"We're trying to decide whether we can fly more," said David Cremer, who heads the Angel Fire project for LANL. "Now that the fire danger has passed Los Alamos, there are still a lot of people at risk and flood dangers as the rains start up."

Cremer said he has heard appreciative comments from colleagues concerned about their homes and anxious to see what open spaces had burned.

Suddarth helped develop the Angel Fire technology, named for the New Mexico resort community, while working at LANL as a liaison with the Air Force Strategic Command. He said he has given the technology a complete redo since 2008, with the idea of making something that doesn't cost between $10 million and $14 million a package, as do some systems used in combat.

The plane and equipment normally would cost $5,000 a day, he said, making it affordable for monitoring wildfires and other disasters. The system also has border security and public applications.

"We can operate this plan for what it would cost to have a helicopter on standby," he said.

The military systems are described in Air Force documents as "staring arrays" and "aerial collection assets." A related technology, Gorgon Stare, comes in configurations with multiple cameras that are meant to give battlefield commanders a full range of vision as well as knowledge of what might be coming over the horizon.

ON THE WEB

• View the lab's aerial photographs of the Las Conchas Fire at www.lasconchas.lanl.gov/aerial.html.