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HD Video From the Edge of Space, On the Cheap
SoundDoc75 links to a page describing the motivations and problem-solving behind "a 10-minute HD video taken on August 24th with a Canon Vixia HF20 HD camera suspended from a 1500g hydrogen balloon and launched near Edmonton, Alberta. This is the first known amateur video taken from this height — 107,145 feet."
The title made me think we had finally reached the outer edge of the Universe, where God lives!
It looks like slashes become backslashes in that height
Seems like a DUP timothy.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Well someone just got a pretty nice new video camera. Assuming the camera was transmitting it's GPS coordinates it's finders keepers.
That's not the first amateur video from that height, I've seen the quality of the video astronauts shoot. If they're not amateur cameramen, who is?
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
But it's still way way cool and I'd love to do something like this myself.
I was thinking of a short-lived TV show I immediately loved and can't think of its name (and sadly, google hasn't been my friend to find it) about a group of people who launch a spaceship to the moon using stuff from a junkyard. In a similar vein, I suppose, as a way of "upping the ante", what would be the chances of attaching a couple of rockets to the side so that, when the balloon has gotten as far as it's going to go, the rockets kick in and push it up that much further? Heck, what would it take to get it into some sort of orbit? I suppose, though, the pictures would look pretty much the same as taken from the balloon; you'd really have to work hard to get a good pic of the earth. Of course, INARS so I'm likely being incredibly naive in my ideas here.
Woah did anyone watch that movie? I'm about ready to vomit on my keyboard. My eyes are still spinning. DO NOT WATCH THAT IF YOU GET MOTION SICKNESS! Woah, just ruined any desire I had to fly in a balloon. Gives new meaning to the words vomit comet.
Qxe4
They are taking the videos while being paid. Astronauts are therefor professional cameramen.
Can they control or limit the camera spin? It makes sense they can't right after the balloon bursts, but I would think there might be some kind of tricks they could do in the atmosphere on ascent and descent.
No, they're professional astronauts with a hobby. I was a professional fireman for years, and sometimes at night I played Pokemon. That doesn't make me a professional Pokemon Trainer.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Well, if you want to get technical, the astronauts aren't taking any video at 100k feet. They're still strapped in at that point, cameras stowed away.
Only if they're being payed to shoot the video.
So, if taking the video is part of their official duties, they're professional cameramen. If it's not, then it's amateur video. And if they weigh less than a duck, they're a witch, and should be burned.
This is the first known amateur video taken from this height — 107,145 feet.
Yes, and I bet it remains the only one taken from that (exact) height. ;)
(If they'd said "this high", I'd have interpreted it to mean "or higher", but strangely "this height" doesn't strike me the same.)
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Actually, judging from the videos of a spacewalk, they do weigh less than a duck.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
You can't tell how much something weighs by how fast it falls. :p
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
In the beginning it reminded me of how cool it is to fly, and I don't mean airliner, I mean small plane, ideally old-school open cockpit. It's not only all kinds of fun, it always detaches you from the world below and its petty concerns, in a way. Up there, you're literally free as a bird, it's magic.
Second half of the vid was one hell of a skydive! :D
Awesome flight, kudos guys!
The boundary of space is conventionally defined at 100 km, or about 260,000 feet. Sending a weather balloon to 107,000 feet is nice, but it's only 40% of the way to the "edge of space."
Which, of course, you could have realized just by thinking about it. We define "space" as meaning "above the sensible atmosphere," and if you get there in a balloon, it couldn't be above the atmosphere.
IIRC. The Apollo astronauts were trained by a professional photographer on how to use the custom (Hasselbak or something close to that.) cameras for use on the moon. They carried them around for months and practiced shooting with them everywhere. For learning how to shoot a picture without getting to look through the view finder I think they did a fairly good job. With those cameras, in that environment they were definitely trained professionals.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Try telling that to the Medieval villagers.
for those who are interested, this bear project has a twitter page : https://twitter.com/BEAR_HAB. (linked twice)
Not a dupe...
Personally, I'd love to see them bring a duck into space in order to test this hypothesis.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
I think their point is that it's the first HD video, not the first video.
editors are cracksmoke
And I'm glad. You see, this information comes from Edmonton. To get it to Slashdot, brave Canadian Voyageurs and their faithful Eskimo sidekicks must trek through millions of miles of frozen wastelands filled with polar bears, undead elk that thirst for dwarven blood, and the occasional crazed Frenchman. It is only the far and distant beacon of crack smoke billowing from the obsidian tower of Slashdot HQ that prevents them from getting lost in the soul-destroying wilds and eaten by madding tundra, a close cousin to the dread gazebo.
That's typically true, but there are seldom exceptions - This being one of them.
If something falls at 0 ft/second, it weighs nothing. If it falls up, it weighs less than nothing.
These things, of course, tell you little about the object's mass.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
... and memory cards, ham radio operators did this one in 1989, which was just standard definition, but it went further (from Illinois to nearly Indianapolis) and higher. It just transmitted the signal back via the UHF transmitter on board.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I haven't read TFA but one thing that springs to my mind whenever I read stories like this is: who do you have to get permission from? I mean, it can't be safe for people to randomly be launching electronic equipment, potentially into the flight path of commercial or amateur aircraft. Is this simply not an issue, or is there a controlling body who schedules such launches?
IANAAE, but I can't help thinking that a valve on the balloon would enable it to survive longer, siphoning off gas when the inner pressure gets too high. What other cheap improvements are available to these guys?
Now I have some idea of what it was like for Joe Kittinger, a guy who sky-dived over 102,000 ft. back in the Fifties.
-l
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Yeah, it's the same thing.
Except that the other story was about different people. And they were from MIT, not Sherwood Park, Canada. And they used a still camera, not a video one.
So yeah, except for the fact that everything is different, it's completely the same.
How exactly do you think they got the video from it?
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
A slashdotter?
What size balloon would need to have attach a small craft that would be able to break thought the atmosphere?
I.e. attaching a rocket. Let alone keeping it on the correct trajectory.
My favorite parts were the brief glimpses of the sun surrounded by black space. That's a very rare sight and I feel like I might not have even seen that before. Every other image I've ever seen of the sun has the bluish atmosphere surrounding it. Very offputting to see the brightness of the sun surrounded by black.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Yay.. another slashdot "from space" article where hasn't even left the atmosphere. Anyone wanna fight about it?
Good points... although these exceptions still wouldn't help you tell whether an astronaut weighed less than a duck. Unless the astronaut fell up, I suppose, but that would be an astronaut with one serious case of gas.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Well, almost. The part of the town that the camera kept spinning past as it rose... somewhere over there.
This is the first known amateur video taken from this height â" 107,145 feet."
they weren't taken at the height, were they? Yes this is the first from the height...not the highest over all~
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I can tell from the canned graphics they edited the video using Pinnacle Studio. Since I also use that for home movies, I am giving myself 5 Insta-cred points (tm). Who ever said a $99 application has no place in space (well space-flavored sky anyway)? Suck it Adobe Premier Pro!
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Who cares? What matters is that they did something that was awesome to do. Imagine yourself lifting up a baloon with a camera attached to it, wondering what will happen. Later on you find your camera back. You wait for what seems to be like forever for the 32GB to get transfered onto your computer. You watch the video from when you were standing in a grass field and watch what happened when you were there on the ground. You watch your camera fly into outer fscking space. You feel like "WOW! Dude that's beautifull... we freakin done it! We actually did it! It worked!".
And then you feel awesome for a complete month, figuring out what to do next, while the world gets to see what you saw.
You're suppose to like this, given the fact that you are on /. What's wrong with you?
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Watching the video I thought the same thing about controlling the spin. All it would take is a rudder mounted on a boom (no elevator).
Then again, why not add an elevator, wings, ailerons, etc? They could add a pico pilot
http://www.u-nav.com/picopilot.html
And have the camera always pointed towards home. Then when the balloon bursts, instead of an out of control fall, they could have a nice controlled glide back to earth.
By giving the wings a ton of dihedral, it would automagically keep the camera steady on descent.
No, they're professional astronauts with a hobby. I was a professional fireman for years, and sometimes at night I played Pokemon. That doesn't make me a professional Pokemon Trainer.
It does if you're playing Pokemon whilst putting out fires :)
Since science has so far not found anything that weighs nothing while at rest, nor anything that wheights less than nothing, that is pure speculation. It is unknown how such objects would behave
Yes, the 218 videos from 107,146 feet and the 342 from 107,147 feet are not the same as this one.
Is this joke from monty python and the holy grail?
As long as you consider a couple of guys on a BBC show to be amateurs in the sens that they were only professional TV presenters, not pro space people, they did it for about $500. They showed the footage on the TV show "Bang! Goes the Theory."
This space available.
Am I the only one that thought of the sperm whale being called into existence, several miles above the surface of an alien planet?
I wonder if they could lock the focus at infinity for better quality?
You can't tell how much something weighs by how fast it falls. :p
I think you're confusing mass with weight. In Newtonian physics, mass is constant, and weight = mass*gravity.
are there any rules for clearing airspace for this kind of thing? What happens when another aircraft hits one?
Seems like now that people are able to do these types of projects for relatively cheap, is that a concern for safety since the "secret" is out? Certainly a number of people randomly sending up weather balloons without notice could pose a problem for air traffic, no?
1) How much power would it take to get to orbit from that height?
2) How hard would this be for a person to accomplish? (Human flight)
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
The Apollo astronauts were trained by a professional photographer on how to use the custom (Hasselbak or something close to that.) cameras for use on the moon.
They were modified Hasselblad cameras (a very nice medium format film camera). They brought the film back but left the cameras on the moon.
Well, one thing they do have in common is that neither group got anywhere close to the 100km (330,000ish ft) altitude which is the internationally recognized edge of space.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Eskimos suck!
Go Lions!
That would make me a professional multitasker!
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Okay:
"a 10-minute HD video taken on August 24th with a Canon Vixia HF20 HD camera suspended from a 1500g hydrogen balloon and launched near Edmonton, Alberta. This is the first known amateur video taken from this height â" 107,145 feet."
Facebook is the new AOL
WTFV. At the end, you can see the people that launched it waiting to retrieve it before it even landed. Unlike those other students who did it on the cheap, it appears these people did something a little more sophisticated and were tracking it the entire time.
What if you use Squirtle or Blastoise to put out the fire?
Look, unless many Bothans die to bring me this "vital" information, I am just not interested.
I measure the value of interest in Bothans/pg. I expect a high amount of Bothan deaths/pg of info. If we aren't talking at least 10 BD/p then I ain't interested.
However, this video was cool, if we can fix the shaky-cam somehow, even cooler.
I'm so awesome I don't need a sig file -Me
They are "amateur radio operators", ie. HAMs. The same people that relay information in emergencies.
You have to take a test of radio circuit theory to get the license. In other words; radio nerds instead of computer nerds.
Of course they were using sophisticated techniques to find the landing site.
I think you're confusing mass with weight.
No, I'm not.
In Newtonian physics, mass is constant, and weight = mass*gravity.
Correct. And you still can't tell how much something weighs by how fast it falls.
You can't tell its mass or its weight by how fast it falls. (If you knew one, you could find the other by the formula you gave, of course.)
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Sure they have. Weight = mass * gravity.
In zero-gravity, everything weighs zero.
Furthermore, to be 100% accurate when describing the weight of something, you should say that weight = mass * gravity - buoyancy, where buoyancy is the mass * gravity of the displaced fluid surrounding the object being weighed (air, usually, whose mass is usually negligible for weighing most objects). So an object which is actually lighter than air actually has a negative weight.
Charizard. Fight fire with fire.
For those of you complaining about the jerky video: STFU!
For those of you saying it isn't practical: So What!
I want to take my hat off to these dudes and give them a hearty round of applause and say "Great job guys!"
My point here is these guys had a vision, that led to an idea, that lead to an exparament where a couple of pretty normal folks did something extrodinary. It is the same kind of curiosity that Ben Franklin had when he flew the kite and "discovered" electricity.
Those of you who have offered criticisim, I ask you to reply to this post and tell me what you have done without backing that approximates or bests their very cool accomplishment.
Those of you who have a vision share it, maybe someone will help you make it an idea so, I invite you to share your vision.
For those of you who have an idea, share it and maybe someone will help you make it real.
We don't need government, business, or universities to make the world a better place; just a few ordinary folks who try to do extrodinary things!
Those of you who think this is just very cool, use this thread to virtually offer your applause and (real) encouraging comments!
Except that in the absence of gravity the weight of the displaced air is zero so the buoyancy term is also zero.
0(weight) - 0(buoyancy) = 0
Sorry no negative weights.
And as long as there is more than one piece of mass somewhere in the universe there is a gravitational force between them even if the masses is far enough away from each other for said force to be negligible.
WRONG.
Lrn2physics.
Quagsire or swampert are superior when it comes to fire because they are both supereffective against fire being water/ground.
This is something I've been wondering for a while. Presumably the video is being recorded to some sort of solid state flash memory. If that's the case, then there shouldn't be any moving parts in the camera while it is recording the video. Why do I see the video seem to stop in certain places, and seemingly skip a few tenths of a second?
:30 mark and the :43 mark in the linked balloon video.
The only theory I can come up with is that the motion is too great, and the camera's processor is unable to keep up with the increased bitrate? Some examples of this are @ the
this cost more than $150
Where is the G.i. joe?
What is it with people massively overhyping fairly routine balloon flights? 32km is not the 'edge of space' anymore than London is on the 'edge of France'
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
(Read this 7 minutes into the video) Ah ... ! What's happening? ...it thought. Er, excuse me, who am I? Hello? Why am I here? What's my purpose in life? What do I mean by who am I? Calm down, get a grip now ... oh! this is an interesting sensation, what is it? It's a sort of ... yawning, tingling sensation in my ... my ... well I suppose I'd better start finding names for things if I want to make any headway in what for the sake of what I shall call an argument I shall call the world, so let's call it my stomach. Good. Ooooh, it's getting quite strong. And hey, what's about this whistling roaring sound going past what I'm suddenly going to call my head? Perhaps I can call that ... wind! Is that a good name? It'll do ... perhaps I can find a better name for it later when I've found out what it's for. It must be something very important because there certainly seems to be a hell of a lot of it. Hey! What's this thing? This ... let's call it a tail - yeah, tail. Hey! I can can really thrash it about pretty good can't I? Wow! Wow! That feels great! Doesn't seem to achieve very much but I'll probably find out what it's for later on. Now - have I built up any coherent picture of things yet? No. Never mind, hey, this is really exciting, so much to find out about, so much to look forward to, I'm quite dizzy with anticipation ... Or is it the wind? There really is a lot of that now isn't it? And wow! Hey! What's this thing suddenly coming towards me very fast? Very very fast. So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like ... ow ... ound ... round ... ground! That's it! That's a good name - ground! I wonder if it will be friends with me? And the rest, after a sudden wet thud, was silence. (Douglas Adams, Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy)
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What a great writeup at Bear-4. This is what Slashdot should publish more of, interesting articles on homemade space exploration (and the like); leave the inane copyright stuff for others to squelch.
I think therefore I can't be ~TTNH
And here's a spreadsheet showing the rate of climb/descent vs. altitude. Fairly simple with a little grep | cut | ...
http://trygnulinux.com/bear4-speed-vs-alt.ods
no, you have us Canadians all wrong... They had to send it via unmanned weather balloon. Do you know how hard it is to control one of those things?
You were almost right on the camera brand. They're a Swedish company called Hasselblad, which translates to "Hazel leaf". Hasselbak also means something in Swedish, namely "Hazel butt".
by the sound of it...
it looks like a fake film to me... you can notice the horizon curvature even at 100 feet and when it's at the top you can't make a single continent out of the image... is that supposed to be how it looks from 32km heights ? I highly doubt it: if you've ever been on an airplane, you'll notice how big a river or a town looks from 3 or 4 km above the surface and that's how this film looks like, a good miscalculation factor of 10, in my opinion... so the maximum altitude would be 10,714 ft, not 107,145 ft !!
Can I put a spell on those who can't spell?
Your wheels are loose and they're losing their grip, good you're there.
Really. How do they know that no airplanes will fly in that area and collide with the balloon?
hemi
These guys http://natrium42.com/halo/flight2/ made a video from 30 km altitude (100.000 feet) almost 2 years ago.
The person you replied to was obviously joking, and they never said that they didn't like the video or the fact that it was made.
The person you replied to was obviously joking, and they never said that they didn't like the video or the fact that it was made.
^ Cognitive FAIL.
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However, this video was cool, if we can fix the shaky-cam somehow, even cooler.
Yeah, all that constant panning of the scenery reminds me of what I see when operating Flight Simulator using only the keyboard.
Descent from 100,000ft without disintegration == all-time egg-drop contest winner!
They don't. But the sky is a big place.
There's footage of one of the Apollo astronauts dropping a feather and a rock at the same time: they DO drop at the same speed.
What a debbie downer you are.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
This was actually the concept followed by one of the X-prize companies. They were going to basically float a rocket up into the sky and then launch it from altitude.
http://space.xprize.org/files/downloads/ansari/da_vinci_project.pdf
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Yes, we knew they would...
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
And I'm glad. You see, this information comes from Edmonton. To get it to Slashdot, brave Canadian Voyageurs and their faithful Eskimo sidekicks must trek through millions of miles of frozen wastelands filled with polar bears, undead elk that thirst for dwarven blood, and the occasional crazed Frenchman. It is only the far and distant beacon of crack smoke billowing from the obsidian tower of Slashdot HQ that prevents them from getting lost in the soul-destroying wilds and eaten by madding tundra, a close cousin to the dread gazebo.
This is, quite possibly, the funniest thing I've seen posted to Slashdot in the forever that I've been reading posts, here. The gazebo reference is the part that pushed it over the line for me.
I read Slashdot at work... and I always thought that made me a professional Slashdot geek.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
This is, quite possibly, the funniest thing I've seen posted to Slashdot in the forever that I've been reading posts, here. The gazebo reference is the part that pushed it over the line for me.
Low five digit UID? Wow, I thank you for the high praise.:)