Amazing amateur space snaps

Might be the wrong forum for this. Too bad. Check out these snaps, taken with a Sony Powershot tied to a weather balloon. Pretty damned amazing, I’d say.
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3024629/Snaps-from-space.html

Wow. That’s fantastic.

Just reading it for the sport, eh?

I look at it every day, practically. Its important to keep up with what the chavs are getting up to, and every once in a while, you actually get something like the above. :wink:

I know some of you will be too embarrassed to be seen with the Super Soaraway Sun on your monitors, but there are other articles on the topic available if you type amateur space snaps into google.

The pictures don’t surprise me so much. What surprised me was that he was able to locate and retrieve the camera.

[quote]Amateur astro-snapper Colin Rich, 27, wrapped his Canon Powershot in polystyrene and duct tape before sending it 125,000ft (24 miles) into the atmosphere.

A timer on the camera, which was bought on eBay, took pictures at regular intervals during the two-and-a-half-hour mission.

When it reached the peak of its flight, the balloon popped and the whole thing — named Pacific Star 2 — parachuted back to earth. [/quote]

Just 2.5 hours to 24 miles high, pop, and parachute back down?

How far might it travel horizontally in that time?

Could he physically observe it that whole time? With binoculars? A telescope? Or did they place a tracking device on it? What if it had landed in the ocean?

[quote=“Mother Theresa”]The pictures don’t surprise me so much. What surprised me was that he was able to locate and retrieve the camera.

[quote]Amateur astro-snapper Colin Rich, 27, wrapped his Canon Powershot in polystyrene and duct tape before sending it 125,000ft (24 miles) into the atmosphere.

A timer on the camera, which was bought on eBay, took pictures at regular intervals during the two-and-a-half-hour mission.

When it reached the peak of its flight, the balloon popped and the whole thing — named Pacific Star 2 — parachuted back to earth. [/quote]

Just 2.5 hours to 24 miles high, pop, and parachute back down?

How far might it travel horizontally in that time?

Could he physically observe it that whole time? With binoculars? A telescope? Or did they place a tracking device on it? What if it had landed in the ocean?[/quote]
They track the balloons with a GPS device. The first one apparently DID almost land in the sea, too.
It was really just the idea of the thing that sparked my interest. What a cool thing to do. But the shots are pretty wild, too.

The article says the attached a basic SATNAV tracking system to it to find it. But seems to me that they couldn’t be sure about actual wind direction through the various layers atmosphere, plus 2.5 hours total is like 1/10 of the Earth if it just went straight up (of course there’s momentum from the earth’s spin but a shitload of drag through the miles going up - they’d have to be dumb lucky to get anything near geosynchronous)… it’s a good question though how they were lucky enough for it not to have drifted into the Atlantic or the Baltic

[edit] jinx

Similar, I think from the same project, here (I’d investigate more but England’s playing!):

andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/t … ak-17.html

(The link is to a video of the balloon trip, posted on Sullivan’s blog; there are more links there.)

Pretty darn cool.

Make magazine has had a few reports about such experiments, but I have not seen too many from places outside the US. In the US, it seems that if your payload does not exceed a certain weight (five pounds?), you do not need to report your balloon to the FAA. Maybe jet engines are designed to chew up to five pounds of electronics…

I always wondered what would happen if someone tried this here in Taiwan. Legally: Is this possible at all? Practically: Say goodbye to your payload. Chances are it lands in the sea, or in some remote mountain area, or on a building, but not very likely in a field or flat land forest. And if it lands in an urban area, someone will surely find a use for your camera(s)…

I’ve been thinking about that too. I have an old Canon digital camera sitting in a drawer and was thinking of the cool shots you could get, although at much lower levels, by tethering the helium balloons with a few hundred yards of monofil. But how do they activate the shutter?

The shutter is controlled either by a circuit (for cameras allowing external shutter release) or by setting the camera into a suitable mode. If you have a Canon, you might want to have a look at CHDK, this is how I shoot RAW with my S3 now. With CHDK (if your camera is supported) you can either use a USB remote switch or a script that will take shots in certain intervals.

Hmmm. I doubt if my camera would be any good for that – its just a wee point and shoot. I think its only like 1.6 megapixels or something, which will give an indication of its age.
My Leica might have something I could use, but I 'aint tying that camera onto no damn balloon and letting it disappear into the sky!

1.6 does sound a bit old and is probably not supported by CHDK, as they rely mainly on two processors that were used in Canon point-and-shoots after the introduction of SD cards.

Depending on how much you would want to invest, one relatively simple and about 1kNT$ solution would be to mount a RC servo to the camera to press the shutter and to control that servo by a microcontroller board like the Arduino.