 merrie says: via Jules Crittenden Of course, all this would be pointless if the guys couldn’t find the rig when it landed, so they dropped a prepaid GPS-equipped cellphone inside the box for tracking. Total cost, including duct tape? $148. Launch Two weeks ago, on Sept. 2, at the leisurely post-breakfast hour of 11:45 a.m., the balloon was launched from Sturbridge, Massachusetts. Lee and Yeh took a road trip in order to compensate for the prevailing winds, which could have otherwise taken the balloon out onto the Atlantic, and checked in on the University of Wyoming’s balloon trajectory website to estimate the landing site. Because of spotty cellphone coverage in central Massachusetts, it was important to keep the rig in the center of the state so it could be found upon landing. Light winds meant the guys got lucky and, although the cellphone’s external antenna was buried upon landing, the fix they got as the balloon was coming down was close enough. The Photographs The balloon and camera made it up high enough to see the black sky curling around our blue planet. The Canon was hacked with the CHDK (Canon Hacker’s Development Kit) open-source firmware, which adds many features to Canon’s cameras. The intervalometer (interval timer) was set to shoot a picture every five seconds, and the 8-GB memory card was enough to hold pictures for the five-hour duration of the flight. The picture you see above was shot from around 93,000 feet, just shy of 18 miles high. It’s short of the widely-accepted Kármán line, which is at 100km (62 miles) up, but it’s in the stratosphere, and it’s still impressive. To give you an idea of how high that i... |
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