During the Polarstern cruise PS144 from August 2024 to October 2024 in the central Arctic Ocean photos of the surface (open ocean and sea ice) were recorded from onboard the vessel with a down-looking camera (GoPro Hero 11 Black) that was installed on port side on the A-deck (at around 20 m from sea level). The viewing angle (off-nadir) was around 53°. Each image has a size of 1114 x 974 pixels. The camera was operated with a sampling rate of 0.5 Hz, taking a picture every 2 s. The visual camera was operated in conjunction with an infrared camera, pointing at the same target, in addition, microwave radiometers measured the surface brightness temperatures of a small area within the camera image (these datasets are also part of the VAMPIRE 1 dataset bibliography https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.990496). The images are down scaled to reduce storage needs and stored as zipped JPG files where one zip file includes one image per minute from one hour. In addition, the images are projected to the ground (top view projection). For that, the ship railing visible in the lower right of each image is masked out, except for a 40 by 40 pixel area showing the white ship hull. This area may be taken as white reference (calibration target) by users who want to use, for example, calibrated brightness information. The projection to the ground uses the roll and tilt angles obtained from the hydrins measurements (available via dship at 1 Hz resolution) and the python package cameratransform with the following parameters: sensor size 6.47mm x 5.05mm and focallength_mm 3.8 mm. Finally the images are cropped to contain a smaller area in the center of the original image. These post-processed images are available in the original temporal resolution. Data is available starting 12 August, 12:15, until 5 October, 10:45. More than 1 hour of data is missing from 2024-08-13 00:18:12 to 2024-08-13 07:58:32, from 2024-08-16 18:43:54 to 2024-08-16 21:29:04, from 2024-08-20 16:38:48 to 2024-08-21 07:04:17, from 2024-08-27 06:59:49 to 2024-08-27 14:40:33 and from 2024-09-19 08:32:25 to 2024-09-19 11:20:01.