Slashdot Mirror
Low Cost Panoramic Views From 112,000 feet
IgorC writes "Some engineering students at Texas A&M University have just received data gathered from a low cost 6 Mpixels digital camera (a Canon PowerShot S3 IS). Via NASA balloon, the camera flew up some 36 kms for 18 hours while storing more than 1600 images. The group writes: ' We are in our preliminary result discovery phase and patched up some of these frames together to produce several panoramic views from that altitude (the camera was looking down). They are viewable on the GeoCam blog. We intend on porting that information on Google Maps and Google Earth. For those of you who are undergrads and want to do something better, the folks at HASP-LSU will have a call for participants next year in their announcement page.'"
Panoramic views - Preliminary results
Auto stitch
These folks had some problems (they mentioned that a picture was taken every 23 seconds and in that time clouds moved enough to make stitching a pain) but for general shots, wow, great app. Takes bloody forever (and you will notice a system slow down, even if you drop the process priority to idle), even on a 4400+ system, but it's certainly faster than doing it by hand in photoshop.
Installer is tiny too, it's not bloated like most software apps these days...
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Amateur... um, balloonists have been doing stuff like this for many a-year. Balloon v1.0 was featured on Slashdot back in 2002. Others have added put up geiger counters and even an R/C glider plane that returned to the laucnhing site.
Don't tell me you're trying to find the half naked girl near a farm house on the 3rd picture...