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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."
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.
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.
It's a shame they didn't put some gyros and a free mount to get better video. If you're going to bother buying a new HD video camera, fly from Japan to Canada and (presumably) help pay for this balloon launch it seems it would have been worth it to put at least one gyro on there. It would have added to the weight (both due to the gyro and due to the extra batteries needed to power it), but it would have dramatically improved the video quality.
(I'm not referring to expensive professional, bulky gyro mounts like http://www.camerasystems.com/rentals.htm -- any gyro would have been better than nothing -- heck, even a spindle mount with a wind vane on the styrofoam cube would have been a big improvement).
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?
Here be signatures
Adding a long streamer to the payload to act like a tail on a kite should have done the trick.
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.
I debated that one myself. A gyroscope would help keep it from pitching but it won't stop spin. There are tracking rigs that lock to fixed points but it would add a lot of weight and expense. Building a vertical wing onto the housing might help but it could make it worse. The best thing would be to use three balloons in a triangle configuration hopefully with ridge rods to space them out a bit. The problem with the rig is it's far too easy for a single balloon to rotate given it has little wind resistance. Three balloons would be more inherently stable.
I was surprised that the camera was still picking-up sound when it was 20 miles high. I thought the air would be too thin for the microphone to sense anything.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
A mechanism to vent gas introduces a rather tragic possible failure vector: equilibrium. Your balloon floats along until it's out of reach of the chase team and you don't get your payload back. (Which might be fine if you're using telemetry.)
At least with this method you're guaranteed that the payload will come back sooner rather than much, much later.
Get off my lawn.