Nova 8 / HAPS-D, Last minute bolt-on - sunrise from altitude Options

[Airbag]

That instrument package could of course land anywhere and could potentially cause damage and/or injury; did you have to take out special insurance? One could for instance imagine the package hitting the windshield of a car at motorway speeds; that would not be good. Not to be a downer, but just wondering...

Airbag

[Tom Tamlyn]

Doug,

Congratulations on a great flight.

(off-topic) I was struck by the pictures of Balloon EARS Oct. 7 in your MobileMe gallery. Is it a balloon mission with a rocket first stage? I couldn't find any discussion.



TTT

(Also curious about best track07, but that's really off topic)

[djellison]

That earlier Balloon was testing Ed et.al.'s plans for a balloon gondola that can fly itself home again. The rocket launched were seperate - just happening at the same venue. BUT - at some point, the CU Spaceflight guys intend to combine high power rocketry and high altitude ballooning

And TRAC was 'The Race Against Cancer' - a friend of mine was a co-organiser so I helped out on the weekend of the event to get things moving. It was quite a few racing drivers from GP2 and below, all racing for free, with the money raised by spectators etc going to Cancer Research UK - http://www.theraceagainstcancer.co.uk/

[djellison]

Movies from the Nova 8 camera

http://vimeo.com/1628664 Ascent Part 1
http://vimeo.com/1628493 Ascent Part 2
http://vimeo.com/1628497 Ascent Part 3
http://vimeo.com/1628414 Descent


Movies from the HAPS-D camera

http://vimeo.com/1628947 Ascent Part 1
http://vimeo.com/1628809 Ascent Part 2
http://vimeo.com/1628810 Ascent Part 3
http://vimeo.com/1626812 Descent


http://vimeo.com/1628991 All of the still images at 6fps from the HAPS-D camera
http://vimeo.com/1629086 All of the still images at 6fps from the Nova 8 camera
Download the MOV from bottom right on these - and you can essentially scrub your way thru all the images at quite a reasonable resolution.

[JTN]

http://vimeo.com/1628493 Part 2
http://vimeo.com/1628497 Part 3

"This is a private video on Vimeo" Looks like some of the HAPS-D ascent movies are also up now, though.

What's the occasional bleeping in the audio track? It sounds like a mobile phone complaining about its battery. Is it one of the cameras?

[djellison]

It's one of the smaller cameras, every time it gets a picture it beeps.

Some of the vimeo stuff is still encoding - give it an hour or so

[jamescanvin]

IMO it's next to impossible to match up a largely homogeneous cloud deck after it's been given 20-30 mins to change its appearance. So this has a heavy dose of guesswork and fudging.



James

[JTN]

I'm creating a thumbnail interface to the images from the HAPS camera, here. This might make it easier to spot the gems without having to download ginormous images.

It's fetching on the fly and rate-limited in an attempt not to lock everyone out and trash Doug's hosting -- so it'll take a while to finish (currently it's mostly furniture ).

(Doug, hope that's OK.)

[djellison]

(Doug, hope that's OK.)

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...st&p=124712

[Paolo Amoroso]

The ascent movies show a white dot in the eastern part of the horizon where the Sun is rising, and the photos show a white trail. Is it the Moon? It apparently is where it was supposed to be.


Paolo Amoroso

[jamescanvin]

Yes, I believe it is the moon.

[JTN]

Yes, I believe it is the moon.

You sure it isn't Saturn

(I presume that's a reflection of the sun in the camera optics, rather than a motion-blurred moon-plus-halo, since the clouds in the same image are sharp and anyway I don't think motion would stretch in that way in a framing camera.)

[jamescanvin]

Yes that's a camera artifact.

There are one or two non blurred moon shots, like the amazing one that doug has in his gallery (top centre).

http://gallery.me.com/djellison#100034/IMG...p;bgcolor=black

[ugordan]

If you hit the download button you get an image that's near to full res... to be honest any larger doesn't offer anything more res wise.

Ahh, stupid me, those were low res previews... I was actually going to suggest lowering the camera resolution a bit as usually stretching it to the max produces color fringing of the Bayer filter and doesn't provide that much resolution at all. I figured you thought the same and lowered the res on the second flight.

[djellison]

NExt time out - I'm dropping to the next size down on the camera, but turning the compression down from 2 to 1 ( 4 being the highest compression )

Doug