New video from the crater shows none signs of a break in activity.

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Common sense potency dictate that when a volcano starts erupting, the best thing to carry into effect is run away. But for a small and somewhat obsessed tie of photographers, news of a new lava-spewing giant somewhere in the cosmos means one thing Its time to book a flight.

In timely April, Martin Rietze spent three sleepless nights huddled next to a broad boulder about 1,600 feet from the mouth of Icelands newly reawakened Eyjafjallajkull volcano, having the time of his life.

Sleepless because when a volcano is throwing car-sized pieces of rock into the weather, you cant close your eyes for a second. “Its overmuch dangerous to sleep, so you have to stay up,” he says from his home in Eichenau, Germany.

Rietze, every engineer who builds delicate electronics for planetariums, is part of a true small group of mostly men worldwide who spend vacations racing to exist as near as possible to molten magma, choking ash clouds and noxious gases, not to mention a rain of smoking-hot boulders.

Volcanophiles breathe all over the world, though there are at best only a pair hundred of them, they estimate.

There are groups and individuals in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, France, the USA and Japan.

They have the appearance to include a high percentage of engineers, computer, electrical, chemical and automatic. Though it once was a solitary pursuit, the Internet has allowed them to experience their work and tips.

Its a labor of love, for the reason that they all know they cant make a living at it, says Richard Roscoe, every Englishman who works as a patent examiner in the European Patent Office. Hes spending this week in Vanuatu to shoot the Yasur volcano.

“One for ever hopes that one will get the really big shot and make acquisition that contract with National Geographic, but the likelihood is very minimal,” he says.

But professionals force onward a large dose of caution. Volcanoes are astoundingly alluring; far too many people take far too many chances around them, say Donna and Steve OMeara, a spend frugally-and-wife team who shoot for National Geographic. “They put firing in peoples eyes and their brain is left behind,” Donna says.