Anyone want to join forces to get photos of space?

mrk

mrk

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A group of MIT students created Project Icarus with the idea of taking pictures of Space on a budget of $150 and they succeeded. Check the site for their pictures, absolutely awesome.

I want to do something similar and wondered if any local folks wanted to team up to do something like this in the near future when the weather conditions are better?

I'll try some on my own getting high rise pictures of town etc as I already have a Canon point and shoot with CHDK working and won't need the GPS tracker for this purpose.

Only need access to a large balloon and some Helium :p

Oh the excitement!
 
I'd be interested but do you have a boat? :p

I can see one of two things happening if you tried to do it around your area, firstly it falls back down into the Solent/English Channel or secondly gets caught up in the gulf stream or something and ends up in Sweden...
 
That's what I was lightly pondering, I wonder if there is a camera out there or a mod firmware that can hook onto a network and beam the pictures back.....probably not :/

Could travel more in land for the launch however I guess :D

DIY wide angle lens aimed downward would be awesome for landscape and aerial photography however and that can be done with the balloon on a light rope as well so no GPS needed!
 
There must be some way to hook into a network, maybe through 3g mobile phone or suchlike. It could just upload the photos to a webserver.
 
As the MIT guys noted though, the phone they were using lost signal around 2500ft and the balloon went to 93000ft they estimated.

If it took 40min to come down from that height it was probably travelling close to 2500ft a minute, so if you were to rely on it transferring once it got back down to that height you would have about a minute for it to resignal, reconnect and upload before it may or may not plunge into the channel! :p
 
As the MIT guys noted though, the phone they were using lost signal around 2500ft and the balloon went to 93000ft they estimated.

If it took 40min to come down from that height it was probably travelling close to 2500ft a minute, so if you were to rely on it transferring once it got back down to that height you would have about a minute for it to resignal, reconnect and upload before it may or may not plunge into the channel! :p
But you waterproof the electronics. Its also garunteed to come back down, so theres no worrys about that.
 
One thing ive noticed is they took a lot of care where and when they launched it using a University's web based balloon wind drift prediction thing and launched on a very windless day - on a windy day the balloon could travel up to 300 miles - not so much of an issue in a country like the US where you can go somewhere that far inland but here that sort of distance could land the thing in France or something :p
 
I suppose you could include a self stamped addressed fold out box with it too... :p
 
Id love to do something like this. I also think that if you could beam, the shots back during the ascent/descent it would be much better. Anyone know what altitude UHF work to?
 
Theres been a group doing this this for a while at uni: Cambridge University Space Flight. Lots of pics/vids in the media section

I didnt have the time to get involved last year but may do this time around.

As for recovery, generally you only launch on realatively still days, ideally when the air currents at altitude are prevailing inland to limit the chances of a lost payload.
Payloads are fitted with a RF transmitter and a gps tracker to predict and record the course, altitude and landing site.

I seem to remeber being told that taking photos becomes difficult, the electronics are all custom built or reverse engineered and customised. IIRC it is primarily due the extreme cold - getting below -56*C this affects systems in various ways: contraction; condensation; batteries and ICs cease to operate efficently etc.
 
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Attatch it to a long peice of string. :p

(May or not be serious).

They mentioned this in the article, and I had been mulling it over but thinking about it there are a lot of unknowns and "hmmmmmms"!

You'd need 29 spools of this to get to the altitude they hit when the balloon burst, that said I'm not sure if it would be strong enough to withstand the ascent. Plus it works out to £144 before postage just for the line.
 
Im a teach er at a secondary school ,and this might be just the project we could run, ill have a word with the management about seeing if we could do this - should be about £100 (conversion rate dependent) to get this done.
 
What you want is a set of small booster rockets once it reaches the edge of the atmosphere so you can actually get it out into space :p

30 of these should cover it for retrieval. The exophere is roughly 17,000m so the extra 13,000 would give a good view :D
 
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