Doug, having just looked through the videos again:

The images are lovely - though I'm trying to work out whether the drop in pitch of the on-board mic with altitude is a function of air pressure or cold or both.

A more stable instrument platform would seem to be the next step. As you say, a longer tether would lower the frequency. It would also help by moving the package out of the worst of the turbulence "behind" what is an unstreamlined object moving at a fast jog (16 kmph) straight up.

Since vanes to supress horizontal rotation can't work (surely the balloon is moving virtually at any surrounding horizontal airspeed?) and would be a disadvantage under pedulum swing (they'd feathervane the package on each swing), why not try increasing the rotational inertia of the package?

If you went for a pair of long booms with a mass at the ends, it'd be more stable - though still free to move, allowing for panoramic views. Better, if you had three booms, you could go for a long tripod-like tether which would hang the package with a virtually assured horizon. Mass increases could be minimal - and you could boom-mount a camera with no negative effects.

Placing the parachute below the balloon but above a bridle for this sort of tether would surely not increase the risk of tangle? (In the video we get a quick shot of near zero g when the package starts falling with balloon material around it, until the parachute fills.)

Incidentally, tell me the parachute falling juicily into frame in the last video is a fix?! Too lucky by half!!!

Andy

We didn't arrive for another 2 1/2 hours.

I think people are missing a point here. The payload is stable to the point of images being, on the whole, not blurred ( which is down, mainly, to a single payload 'deck', and a very long balloon-to-payload line ). Beyond that, you don't want a stable payload, because otherwise you would have a thousand images of the same direction. You don't want that. You want it moving around a bit to fill in the panoramas - and to be honest, all the ideas we could possibly come up with add things for lines to get wrapped around at launch, flight, and burst ( bad ) and mass ( very very bad ).

Look at the movies just before the burst. They're astonishingly stable, and have a nice gentle rotation. I think the trick I've missed is not doing enough stills sequentially. I think next time I'll do an imaging minute, then a movie minute ( so 20xstills, then a gap, then a 15s movie, then 45sec, repeat) . What we need is an imaging strategy based on the sort of dynamics we see with this flight - to get better mosaics out of it.

Incidentally, no one has started making mosaics from the movie frames yet... It sort of works, but will take some work.

Doug

And what about a small camera with wide angle, like a fisheye view, at the bottom of payload, looking at the ground (a sort of MARDI-like instrument) ? It will complete the imagery setting with the first camera.
Tell me if it's a bad idea

That is something I'd like to do, and I think I can for about 50g - getting a fish-eye lens to do it, though, is quite hard. A Vistaquest 1005 would do the job ( google Catcam ) - but a wide angle lens is hard to find that small - infact, I'd like two - one up, and one down

Doug

A lower-mid-altitude (EDIT: ~3000m to ~3200m) horizon pan:

Click to view attachment

Given the fact that you could almost walk from Cambridge to Norwich without being more than 20ft from an RAF base at any time, I was about to say 'Wow - a bit of Norfolk without an RAF base' - but actually, there is one hiding in there. Great work - why on earth would anyone ever hold back with their pictures and not let people do this sort of thing.

What is the reason for the 30 second sleep in every minute of camera operation? Is it heat, space on SD card, or something else?

The potential for getting regional haze layer information totally fascinates me:

How about using two cameras as suggested (one pointed towards the horizon, one looking sorta downwards) but with polarizing filters over the lenses. The two (relatively cheap) polarizing filters could be offset by 90 degrees.

You'll probably get enough swing that you get overlapping images of the horizon with both cameras. Presto, you get two different polarization modes.

-Mike

You'd still need calibration capability of the data as two different, cheap-o cameras will behave quite differently even in identical conditions. Remember we're not dealing with scientific instruments here!

Bingo. I wanted a 50% buffer on capacity. From when I turned it on, to landing, used just over half the card. I wasn't 100% sure what the average image size would be at altitude ( taking a photo of a photo from altitude doesn't work as a test ) and there's a HUGE question mark over flight time (2hrs 50 we got - could have been an hour longer, or an hour less without too much being different)

So - I was cautious, but as a result, we got the entire flight fairly well documented instead of most of it very well documented or some of it brilliantly documented

Doug

This whole thing has been an astonishing and beautiful sucess - enormous congratulations to everyone involved. You may recall I was interested way back in 3D image possibilities from this project. With so many images obtained from many different heights and no doubt some relative movement horizontally too I wonder if anyone has tried cloud 3D (viewed with the horizon vertical-ish?)

Doug,

Does your camera have a UV filter? That might help a bit with being able to see farther through the haze.

If you do have a downwards-viewing camera, may I suggest a wind tell-tale a la Phoenix? It will not mean much scientifically, but would be cool to watch. Maybe a short stick pointing downwards with a shorter section of ribbon? (There's a sponsorship idea, buy an "inch" of ribbon and the team will write your name on it!)

Other than that, it looks perfect to me! Wouldn't it be great if every weather balloon had an imaging package?

I tried, but it's mainly a no-go because of cloud evolution and various lateral motions. This for example doesn't look at all impressive:
Click to view attachment
It's probably only good for giving one a headache.

Ha! Very interesting all the same to see that attempt. Those clouds are of course a particularly fast-evolving type of cloud. It might work better with some of the higher ones. Maybe a much higher view looking down through the various layers? Of course it would be easy enough to shoot nice simultaneous pairs of terrestrial clouds from the ground, but I'm thinking of the implications for balloon probes at Titan or Venus. How effectively can evolving cloud forms be studied using images from a single, moving platform within the atmosphere? I think what you've done there does at least begin to address that question. Maybe this is another consideration to factor into the imaging strategy for follow-ups.

Clearly, we need a camera on each end of a twenty foot pole. I guess that will have to wait for the larger payload that will be necessary for the IMAX version.

That's more or less what I suggested to Doug when the project was first mooted - either that or two balloons somehow tethered together, or even independent but launched simultaneously a short distance apart. All such options were understandably ruled out for the Mark I, but I still have hopes . .

OK folks, after the balloon burst and HAPS-1 was plummeting back to Earth it did manage to grab a few shots pointed more towards the ground. Here is what I'm been able to piece together. Hardest jigsaw ever!





It's a bit dodgy, many of the images were quite badly blurred from the rapid motion of the falling gondola and the point of view changes quickly as it falls. So it was a challenge to match many of them up. But it is still so far in advance of what I thought possible from this flight I'm over the moon about it really.

Congrats to all involved, I'm very proud to have been able to help out in my own little way on this amazing project.

Cheers,

James

Believe me - watch the utter chaos that is involved in one launch....and you wouldn't think of saying 'can we do two?' - and to be honest, I can't imagine the statistical chance of two independent balloons pointing in independent directions on independent trajectories framing something from a stereo baseline is very high. As for two balloons - you would never be able to fill them the same, thus one would overtake the other and you would just have two cameras, one above the other - and the strops would rub on the lower balloon causing it to fail quite quickly.

Good work James....now do all the movies - like this

I look at the view from these altitudes and imagine how insane it was that Michel Fournier was going to skydive from a similar height (until his balloon escaped.)

I'd make some sarcastic comment about how amateurish that must be.....but James and Ed are both registered at UMSF. Not that I'm saying I thought I missed a launch a few months ago as a balloon headed up shortly before I arrived only to find that they were still getting ready.


Doug

Hi all, first post. I'm the name-checked Ed of Doug's earlier post. I'm really amazed at what you guys have done with all the raw data, we'll certainly release every scrap of stuff we get next time! We've been at this balloon game a while now but I've never seen such good photography. Really inspiring stuff.

We were talking to Doug about using our flight computer on the next flight (it's not let us down since we designed it) and that will have 3 axes each of accel and gyro data logged at whatever frequency we have room for on the SD card. Having seen the signature double 'thwack' of the disc-gap-band opening on the Phoenix accelerometer data, I'll be intrigued to see if any of you guys can deduce the type of chute we'll be using for our next flight. It'll be deployed at 1km ASL to minimise the drift on the way down, so there should be a pretty decent deployment signature from the 1G under drogue. It should also be stable, so come down straight rather than corkscrew - a behavior you can see from simple flat chutes (MVI_6506 of the videos demos this nicely). Interestingly, nasa found similar behavior when performing high altitude tests of Ringsail parachutes - they don't established a stable glide/equilibrium like they do at lower altitudes, and just corkscrew around instead.

If any of you can make it to Cambridge for the next flight, you really should. We had left over sausage rolls, scotch eggs, and humous.

Some people asked about relative wind speed between payload and air. It's basically 0 as the balloon just gets whisked along with the wind. Sheer on the way up tends to cause most of the buffeting. Active yaw control is something we looked at, but unless we really really need to start flying fly wheels and motors, we won't. East Anglia's green houses wouldn't appreciate it. We'll try some passive radial ears to see if that damps some of the swinging down.

This stuff is good fun. Earth runs out pretty quickly, it's surprising.

Ed
cuspaceflight.co.uk

This was insane.


Paolo Amoroso

It had a hole in it! We had to let it go. They don't burst, surprisingly. But I did enjoy your hand-brake turn onto the field.

I was so disappointed to learn that. I wanted some sort of drum-bursting shock-wave.

These work so well!!!! Screw stills - just do HD movies like this and you're sorted

I'm lost for words. I hope this story makes the news beyond this forum. James, Doug, what magical images! I'd really like to read the roll call of all who contributed to this and know how the project came to fruition (in not too technical language).

Tell you what Nigel, there might be enough movie-generated 360's to get sideways stereo (as if you head was at 90 degrees).

I've not aligned these movie-pans to be the same orientation as one another - but a quick tweak would sort that out.

Doug

I'm watching this space. You've got a gold mine of images there to be sure.

I'm a bit late to the party, but: waaaaaay coooooool.

--Emily

In the GPS log, what's the significance of the odd log entry around the time of apogee? Did the balloon burst somehow upset the GPS or computer for a second?

And yet there's still weather (of a kind) way above even here. (very unscientific illustration!)

Click to view attachment

Belated congrats, Doug & team....WAY cool, incredible! You guys touched space, never mind piddly definitions...

Wow Doug! Simply Wow.

Congratulations to you and to your team a dozenfold.

I got to thinking (well, googling) about the downward (and upward?) looking fisheye question and encountered: http://aggregate.org/DIT/peepfish/ . I though it worth passing along if you had not already seen it. Also, along that line of thinking there is this: http://www.doorscopes.com/hiw.htm .

I would suspect that both of these would bring with them a rather significant if not prohibitive, mass hit. None the less, I hope it is at least in some ways useful.

-- Pertinax

(BTW, are you dumping the videos to stills and then creating your panos from those, or do you have software that directly creates panos from panned videos?)

Yup - exporting at 5fps (or the full 15 for the really fast moving after burst )

For those who wish to dump those stills and join in the fun, either Quicktime Pro or this piece of freeware will do the trick.

Here is an attempt to fill in the missing bits using stills from the video.

Someone needs to name an asteroid or a comet after James.

Seconded, 'cos an island just isn't enough !

Really amazing,.. but I have a bad case of altitude sickness (I want MORE!! ) Oh dear, fantasy ballooning... I'm daydreaming about a stabilisation vane for the ascent taking the form a tube-launched rocket (or rather, fins at one end of it) with the imaging payload at one end? At 10mb there wouldn't be much need for a strong (heavy) aerodynamic fairing, so long as the payload and decent chute could take the G. Horizontal launch with a simple mechanical system to steer the rocket vertically upwards after a near-horizontal launch... I've got such a system in mind, but luckily there's insufficient space in this margin to describe it. Hmmm, rocket mass... multiple balloons... lifting capacity... *hits google with a naive hope that it won't instantly prove to be a non-starter*
(Edit:grammar fix)

Technically, Canvey Island is visible in the images, I think. Foulness Island almost certainly is.

http://www.cuspaceflight.co.uk/martlet

We're having a go!

Consider one of the photos near apogee that show mostly black sky, such as this. If Doug takes a dark frame on the ground with the same equipment and the same camera settings, possibly cooling it a bit to have comparable thermal noise levels, it might be possible to compare noise densities or patterns in the images and check for any radiation effects. Can similar comparisons be done with electronic noise in the videos soundtracks?


Paolo Amoroso

No need to cool the camera, as cosmic ray hits are very obvious -- they leave bright pixels or trails on the image, given a long-enough exposure.