Low Budget Air Space Photography 162
An anonymous reader writes "With a budget of just 350 pounds, two British PhDs in engineering sent a balloon with cameras attached to a height of over 30 km." The photos and video are pretty amazing. Especially the very hi-tech styrofoam box.
heavy! (Score:3, Funny)
With a budget of just 350 pounds...
That's some heavy styrofoam!
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It's 2011, and Slashdot apparently still doesn't support anything outside the EBCDIC character set.
£?
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The £ symbol works for me when I type it on my UK keyboard.
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What about the euro?
€
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It works when I use the compose,l,- combination: £
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Does that mean I can safely throw out my drum cards for punch decks of Fortran, COBOL and RPG II programs?
Not bad, but not new (Score:5, Insightful)
Neat video. Of course, amateur groups have been doing this for decades, so it's not really news:
http://www.eoss.org/
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Pretty sure balloon space photography takes a little more doing than a case mod.
Probably not. At least, not a good one. I feel fairly confident in my ability to send up a balloon with a camera in it. But I would have trouble making even a simple looking case like this [extremetech.com], this [gearlog.com], or this [elitechoice.org].
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I predict that it will be home-brew nuclear reactors that will be the next big thing that will follow after these balloon stories stop getting submitted or posted. At least one guy that I know [prometheus...ection.com] is building a homebrew Polywell reactor, and if others start to follow his lead, it could get interesting.
High school science fair projects have been building Farnsworth-Hirsch fusors for many years now, including this guy who is attempting a Polywell reactor. He already got a fusor going but building a Polywell rea
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Maybe an Imax 360 HD 3D camera will Dolby surround sound and music specially composed by the Philharmonic orchestra will be the next big thing...
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Music *composed* by an orchestra would indeed be an innovation. Heretofore, almost all music is composed by individuals or small groups (e.g. two or three people working together, usually one on the tune one on lyrics). Getting 80 to 100 people to work together to create a significant piece of music would be very interesting IMHO. It'd be tough though, since the violins would never stop playing, the brass and woodwinds would all try to give themselves some good solos, most would try to keep the percussion f
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And I was involved into a similar project last summer: Video on YouTube [youtube.com]
A few of the pics in the video are mine, other pics by other people or the onboard camera.
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350 pounds? With a weight budget like that, they could have sent me to the edge of space. That would have been an amateur record.;)
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I can't speak for Think Geek, but I'm quietly selling balloon payload computers now. The current board rev was intended for internal testing only, but there was enough demand that we built some extras and sold them. The next version will be more flexible and will let the user run their own code on an Arduino and maintain separation from the critical tracking tasks. For now, it's really almost too simple for educational uses. With the callsign pre-set, you only have to pop in a couple of lithium batterie
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er... Nice to watch and good on 'em fer doing it but hardly amazing. Certainly nothing new here. The balloon tech has been publicly available for over 50 years. Upper air observations using more or less the same balloon tech have been in effect for at least 50 years as well. Co-ordinated international launches occur at 0000Z and 1200Z from over 800 locations in the world. All of the data is shared.
Lots of references available... Wikipedia has some nice stuff on it as does the NOAA.
A nice side-effe
Air clearance? (Score:3)
Re:Air clearance? (Score:4, Informative)
But generally, a very straightforward formality / folks dealing with it tended to be nice.
Re:Air clearance? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Air clearance? (Score:5, Interesting)
Our group has never submitted a NOTAM, because we are exempt. I have audio recorded of a "near miss" [youtube.com] with one of our group's balloons. Never saw the jet, but it sure sounded close. I think we will be filing NOTAMs from now on, even though we are not required to.
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Looks like someone found your jet!
Simpsons did it. (Score:2)
Time travel (Score:2)
If you watch the video carefully, you will see they invented time travel as well!
has been done dozens of times now (Score:2)
The "swiss-army-knife" smart phone is the device that makes this possible. It does almost everything you need for a couple hundred bucks..
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Indeed. I'm surprised this story keeps getting posted every time some group of geeks decides to do this. It isn't newsworthy anymore and the pictures, while great for amateurs, are not so worth my time compared to NASA or USAF photos.
-d
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It isn't newsworthy
This is about the 10th comment I read about the article not being original. Should be modded +1 funny for the irony of it. If you are criticising an article for not being original, what about the comments?
Nothing to see here, float along... (Score:3)
No money for licenses though (Score:2)
Cool, but... (Score:2)
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If these were Ph.D. graduate students, they don't have a whole lot of disposable cash in their pockets. Feasibility comes down to how much do they want to spend of their own money on something that might be destroyed or lost, or how much feature creep do they want when they just want to launch it. If their motivation was to move the bar on amateur balloon launch innovation, then perhaps they could/should/etc. have done what you suggested or much more. However, if it was something more like the desire to
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I think they're a bunch of lying pretentious twats too. They were using an iPhone as their ground based tracking device. That's their £350 budget blown immediately and they should've gone android.
Not to mention launching from Derbyshire. I hate Derby supporters. They're all twats :(
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A fisheye lens would do - couple of those and you only need two cameras - use video processing to stitch the two movies together and you have a full 360x180 view. Or get one of those "Gorgon Stare" military surveillance camera systems.
Future is here! (Score:2)
swinging and spinning (Score:2)
I expected there to be less swinging and swaying well above the clouds. Commercial jets, at a mere 10 km high (very roughly) are able to often find very still air. Three times higher isn't very very very still? Do we have any experts here?
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Their balloon had no provisions to efficiently damp acquired oscillations.
I know nothing about balloon design. How do you dampen perturbations?
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I know nothing about balloon design. How do you dampen perturbations?
With water.
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I know nothing about balloon design. How do you dampen perturbations?
With water.
Seriously? As in, you put a small amount of water in the balloon along with the helium?
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In my occasional toying in this area I might even one day try a variant of Picavet suspension [wikipedia.org], or segmented tether made from partly-rigid segments of unequal length (to get in the way of clean or even self-exciting oscillations), just to mention two (quite possibly ineffective) ideas (plus especially the second might have problems with r
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Also, the price for the A1200 is $229 which is not much less than the GoPro at $259.
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Where were you able to find such rip-off for A1200? (while still barely available, it's already at a bit over $100 / should be sub-100 relatively soon; oh, and in practice the differences are much larger for me - the less prosperous the place, the bigger the premium on top of US prices, doubly (or triply, or...) so for niche products - OTOH not so bad for mass consumer ones)
Generally, that 170 degrees seems horizontal / full-frame. What I had in mind would greatly benefit from hemispher
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http://www.sears.com/shc/s/p_10153_12605_66610683000P [sears.com]
If you're looking for cheap... try this:
http://www.usbfever.com/index_eproduct_view.php?products_id=867 [usbfever.com]
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And too bad also full-frame / maybe I'll yet cook something up with acquainted optician...
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Simple answer: Stillness isn't a monotonic function of altitude.
Simplified more complicated answer: Air comes in layers, many layers, depending on the local weather, but there are generally several major layers covering the whole earth (stratosphere, troposphere, etc.). Each layer has its own characteristics of temperature gradient and general wind pattern. Between the layers is where the most turbulence is, because air really doesn't like shearing. And in one of the upper layers winds of hundreds of kph
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I also suspect the swinging parts of the video were more interesting. The camera would not show as much when it was not moving around.
I thought about that ... seems a shortcoming of the imaging mechanism they chose. More than one camera might have been useful.
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At high altitudes there's much less friction from air to dampen oscillations.
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Good example (Score:2)
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Bah, humbug (Score:2)
It was news the first time someone did it, but not the 100th or whatever we're up to now. I've lost count of how many times slashdot has run "balloon takes camera to edge of space for $x" stories.
Near space (Score:2)
Many have pointed out that the idea is not new and they are right. Although, IMHO, it is still cool to see stories about near space activities by amateurs.
Here are some resources to explore:
* Nuts and Volts magazine has run an excellent series of articles on constructing all sort of instruments and flight gear for near space projects. Including the basics of regulations, etc. (US centric). They still run the odd piece now and then on updated and additional tech solutions from readers.
http://www.s [scribd.com]
It's Happened Before (Score:2)
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I know this makes me a sissy, (Score:2)
GPS fail? (Score:2)
Re:It's NOT SPACE (Score:5, Funny)
oh and by the way... Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny? NOT REAL!
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oh and by the way... Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny? NOT REAL!
If we are going to be scientific about it, then prove to me they don't exist ;)
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OTOH, the OP was incorrect in implying an error. The article only claims "edge of space," which seems accurate enough to describe a height where the contrast between the earth's atmosphere and space can be clearly seen.
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The title says "air space". A bit weird, but basically accurate.
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350 lb. payload? *giggles* You realize they meant 350 English pounds, as in the cost of the project, not the weight of it?
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Actually, it's space.
It's just not outer space. But the news never claimed that they reached outer space.
I just reached space bar six times.
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I just reached space bar six times.
I'll have a pan-galactic gargle blaster.
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Next story: four PhDs in engineering build pinewood derby car, lose to boy scouts
Think they should mail their diplomas back to whatever website they ordered them from
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It is mostly the dads of the Cub Scouts who make the pinewood derby cars, so I would argue that losing to a bunch of Boy Scouts is more likely something made by the actual kids.
Pinewood Derby competitions turn into flat out Pinewood Derby Engineering complete with wind tunnels to reduce drag from air turbulence, grinding axles with a lathe, and studies of various lubricants to beat out the competition. One interesting book I just read even went into the moment of inertia for the car to maximize the amount
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Difference between Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts [hardingdistrictbsa.org]
The people who actually do Pinewood Derby: Linky Link [wikipedia.org]
While the Cub Scouts are part of the BSA, it is not the Boy Scouts that do Pinewood Derby races, it is the Cub Scouts. There is a pretty big difference between making it through Weblos and making it to Eagle (trust me, I have done both).
Please do not confuse the two.
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What is sad is that a real story [slashdot.org] about a vehicle going to this altitude, but with technology that clearly can go much further, was simply ignored and forgotten. The difference? Pretty pictures.
Personally, I think the idea that a rocket that may go to the Moon eventually is something worth "news for nerds". Yet another "high altitude" balloon launch? Not really.
I thought the same thing.... More high altitude balloon pictures? I'll wait for the tourists who go up on the VSS Enterprise to bring back their
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Yeah, because the video in the story wasn't cool at all because it only went up 30km and not 100km. Riiiiiight.
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Just call it what it is (constant reporting of it, not the fun activity itself!) - some temporary media fad / phenomena.
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Which in itself wasn't unheard of since a few years [members.shaw.ca] even in 2005... (BTW, except for "just a balloon" media fad resurfacing in a few years and people forgetting this round, I fully except "OMG it's a spaceplane!" fad relatively soon)
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I think I've seen more than one "just a balloon" in UK mainstream media few years ago)
realize that 'uk' is not 'world.
most of us havent seen it. it didnt exist for us.
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And considering relative audiences - yeah, UK mass media is pretty much the world when compared to US ones / you're doing it wrong (it's usually the other way around)
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any clearer ?
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Because as you see from the start of the video - it's from December 2011!
Not only did they send this into space, but they sent it back in time!
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2011 here, but it sure as hell isn't December yet.
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Not to mention this has been done, like, 93 times in just the past couple years. It's like a new hobby sweeping the land.
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Hey!
You're that guy I'm always 'lucky' enough to bump into at parties.
I remember you saying you were part of some club, was it the TIA (Totally Irrelevant Anecdotes) or CBHFO (Can't be happy for others) ?
Please don't let me know, thanks.
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Considering how often my cell phone has been "accidentally" left on in my baggage while I've taken a trip on an airplane, I hardly think that it really causes too many problems. I really don't think my experience is that unusual as I've read the same thing from other people, and it was cell phones on Flight 93 that alerted some of the passengers on that flight that there might have been a bit of a problem with terrorists on 9/11.
Yes, I can understand why the FCC wants to discourage the practice, but I'm su