home made balloon camera pics of earth

cool story

just noticed there's a youtube on neatorama...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2KuPe_J5X4&feature=player_embedded

mid-space camera is IDM

it's like the Dayvan Cowboy video

that's fucking rad, wow

[youtubehd]nojl3aiYBOw[/youtubehd]

This one is a couple of months old but fucking awesome and would make awesome visuals

Two things:

So the balloon goes up miles and miles high, pops at a certain altitude and then parachutes back down. He uses a GPS tracker to recover the box. I should imagine he only sends the balloon up when he knows it won't float out to sea, but who's to say it couldn't land in Germany or something?

Isn't this illegal? It probably shouldn't be, but the balloon could interfere with planes or the box might not drop properly and end up killing someone.

Oh well, it's still a nice idea. Apparently NASA have even congratulated him.

  Quote

Launching the balloon requires permission from the Civil Aviation Authority so Mr Harrison usually travels to one of two approved sites in Cambridge.

Okay, he has permission and a safe launching site.

So maybe I just don't understand enough about the process (almost certainly true) and it's very unlikely that it could float over to Europe.

  On 3/30/2010 at 3:42 PM, Gary C said:

but the balloon could interfere with planes

yeah i thought that especially after reading...

  Quote

At ground level the helium balloon has a diameter of one metre. As it rises, the air pressure drops and the balloon expands to a diameter of up to 20 metres.