This is juts fantastic! Felicitations.
Can't wait for the picture taken from above by MRO. You planed it, didn't you ?

That's pretty bloody cool Amazing what you can do with relatively little resources.

Right - ALL the JPG's, AVI's, as well as three MOVs (which string together all the AVI's into about 25 mins of movie ) are uploading now - it should be done by the end of the day - I'll post links when it's finished, and then I'll do some mosaics and a 'best of' with alt info etc.

D

Doug and all involved,

Kudos!
I just love it when people 'just do it'!!!!

All the raw movies
http://www.umsfbu.com/HAPS1/VIDEOS/

Probably better are these
http://www.umsfbu.com/HAPS1/EDITED/MOVIES/

Three MOV's which show all the movies strung together - and one MOV which shows every still in sequence at 6fps

The Stills are still uploading. I gave up trying to get GPS into the EXIF - I'll just do a page of the best stills and mosaics

http://www.umsfbu.com/HAPS1/PHOTOS/

Wow! The descent movie is a fantastic ride back to earth from the edge of space. Astonishing, thanks for that.

This is freakin' awesome. Tell me those aren't jet engines I hear from 6:46 till 6:56 in the first movie, http://www.umsfbu.com/HAPS1/EDITED/MOVIES/...6_1325_1424.MOV ?

The middle movie with the solar flare and wind noise sure reminds me of Shuttle SRBs when they start falling back down.

BTW, is the camera limited to 8 bit audio only?

Fascinating venture! Congratulations!

Yeah first you may think the ride on the balloon is intense before you've seen the ride with the parachute
Apropos, if it's desired, would it be possible to stabilize the payload with a kind of tail unit that run with the wind?

In this sequence do you hear an airplane too? http://www.umsfbu.com/HAPS1/VIDEOS/MVI_6080.AVI
A violation of the exclusion zone

OK wget is still downloading but this has to be the coolest:

http://www.umsfbu.com/HAPS1/PHOTOS/IMG_6103.JPG

Right in the middle, that's the moon!

Confirmed with Celestia.

To be honest, you would probably just make it worse. It's just too chaotic and random to try and guesstimate what might or might not make it all more stable. Anything that can give the parachute something to get tangled up in, probably isn't a great idea. That's why I decided against putting a small camera out on a beam to image the payload in-situ. The best way is to make a small payload, and put it on a long long line to the balloon and let the laws of physics ( and the low frequency of the pendulum you're left with) do the rest.


MVI_6080.avi is just a sub-set from that large MOV ( the MOV's are all the AVI's in sequence ) - so it's the same thing - and at 11,000ish M ( 36kft ) - it's not beyond the realm of possibility that there's an aircraft nearby. Given that I can hear the aircraft at 15kft the way into East Midlands from the ground here - it wouldn't have to be close to hear it. That that sound is the only thing for, well, 11km in any direction - and without a lot of doppler shift it's not passing that close by.


The audio is infact only 11khz 8bit mono off the camera - that's all it's got I"m afraid. It was a £70 camera, I didn't fancy risking anything more expensive than that.



Yeah - we spotted that last night looking at them from the boot of our car....I thought I'd see how carefully people were looking

Curious about those first couple of blurred stills. Was there an autofocus feature activated?

SERIOUSLY impressive stuff, congratulations to everyone involved. Technically superb, and also just a v v cool thing to do!

The JPG's have finished uploading - so it's all there - enjoy

The first few stills are blurry just because it's REALLY moving around, 180deg/sec in some cases - look at the second .avi to see what I mean.

MVI_6494.AVI is at apogee and you can see pieces of the ballon just after it has burst ( and the resulting chaos that freefall at 106,000 ft and 11mbar )

From 1520Z to 1530Z, the payload was over 30km - which is images IMG_6447 to IMG_6501 ( or MVI's in the same range )

Now I've looked through them all I see there are even cooler black sky + curved horizon + moon setting shots.

e.g.

http://www.umsfbu.com/HAPS1/PHOTOS/IMG_6313.JPG

When you download the images, can you still find the 'image taken' time on them? If so - you can X-ref that back to the BIG LOG. (The EXIF image data has that)

http://www.pegasushabproject.org.uk/wiki/d...s:haps-1:biglog

i.e. 6313 was taken at 145502 - which means an altitude of 22482.7M - only 2/3rds the way 'up'

Doug

LOL - love this page - http://www.eoss.org/handbook/chap3.htm

"If you stacked pop cans 100,000 ft high, it would take about 259,500 pop cans (each pop can is 4 -5/8 inches high when you subtract out the part of the can that fits inside the can below it). That's about 10,800 cases of pop."

This image - http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtim...7132500.4km.jpg at 1320Z is 5 mins before launch. It's distorted - but the near realtime subset image for Aqua will use that same image, properly projected..

So these two (the Aqua ones, not Terra - that's 2hrs earlier) cover the view over the UK, and to the east, at, roughly, flight time

http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/subsets...pe_2_01.2008237
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/subsets...pe_2_02.2008237

http://www.umsfbu.com/HAPS1/PHOTOS/IMG_6504.JPG

"My God, it's full of stars!"

Yes I've still got all the 'modified times' preserved as the time each was taken. The latest and hence highest moon shot I can spot is this:

http://www.umsfbu.com/HAPS1/PHOTOS/IMG_6435.JPG

Very close to setting at 16:17BST - ~29,000m (95,000ft)

Here's the combined view using google earth, and the KMZ's that the MODIS guys produce.

A quick pan:


Click image for full size version - (9016 x 2686) 1.7Mb

Around 180 degrees, looking east out over the North Sea. North is somewhere on the left. At the bottom of the second image from the left you can just see the curve of the coast of East Anglia. Under the cloud on the right should be Northern Europe. The moon is in there to, just left of centre. Taken at between 28,000 - 31,000m (92,000 - 101,000ft)



James

Just when I thought it couldn't get any better, the image wizards step in.

Now if someone would trace in the coastlines, that would be a real treat.

Doug, you should definitely submit this to Lunar Photo of the Day.


Paolo Amoroso

Now that is just sick!!!

Probably wrong, but roughly indicative, and certainly badly photoshopped....

About the same as what I reckon. That'll be Denmark on the horizon, and on the far right not shown on Doug's overlay should be The Netherlands. Pretty much the whole North Sea there.

I matched up the bit of East Anglia in that shot, it's the very northern tip.

Click to view attachment

Pink lines show the ballon trajectory in the forground.

The earth really does look like Google says it does; only bluer!

I knew that if and when this worked, I would see you guys come up with every mosaic and analysis an interpretation - far quicker and far better than I could. I just tried to get the best data I could to feed the machine

I now understand, perhaps a bit more than most, how and why Steve and Jim and Alfred and Pete do what they do. I now also can not understand, more than ever, why Europe does the opposite. But I can tell you I know EXACTLY why the ESOC guys have turned that VMC back on.

For our foreign friends, it's probably worth mentioning that The Wash ( that U shaped bay ) would appear to change a lot from altitude, as it's almost all very very shallow and produces large sand-banks at low tides. It's the venue for the story of King John's Treasure ( probably false ).

Doug

Ah I know a bit about The Wash and St. John's Treasure and The Fens from Louis L'amour's Sackett series. There's nothing more entertaining than historical fiction.

Fantastic stuff; the video is just hypnotic. I also wondered about some sort of weather vane to at least slow the speed of the oscillations (though no oscillation = no pan) but the risk of tangling the chute would be non-zero. Would that be the purpose of the boxkite-like affair ISTR seeing in photos of met balloons?

That dark sky and curved horizon is so, so tantalising... hmmm a quick Google turned up this report of a 100000' rockoon launch reaching "30-36 miles apogee", and the HAL5 HALO project which seems to have gone quiet in recent years(?)

Now THIS is what I always wanted from the UMSFB/HAPS-1 project - 360 degree panorama!





Click image to go to my (never before used) blog with various sized download options.

I'll have a look for more images to try and fill in the foreground tomorrow.

Enjoy,

James

Oh my... this is seriously becoming APOD material

The next balloon better have gyros for attitude and pointing determination so panorama stitching can be automatized.

Get the **** out of here. That is INSANE.

QTVR of it attached:

Doug's next objective?

Click to view attachment

Along the same lines as above. Congratulations to Doug and the HAPS-1 team.
Click to view attachment
Astro0

Here's a Photosynth of the first 70 photos (only 20% Synthy, it can't match up about half of the images) that is pretty cool once you get used to the viewer interface. It matches and stitches the images, but Photosynth unfortunately can't output a panorama or mosaic.

HAPS-1 Version 2

Added a spherically distorted and otherways modified version of the NOAA-18 image to the blank spot to try and fill in the gap:

Click to view attachment

Blink GIF showing the modified NOAA-18 image then overlain by James Canvin's mosaic:

Click to view attachment

(The white line in the modified NOAA18 image defines the "pig's bottom" part of East Anglia):


-Mike

Hello to the forum and congratulations...
May I ask about the complications involved to "clear" this flight ?
Is the BAA not "down with this sort of thing"...
I'm quite "undulled" as a Scotsman myself...
cheers All,
Eoin

I played with some images around the horizon, lining them up and looking at the horizon to black sky transition around the mosaic:

Click to view attachment

I think you can see some forward scattering (brighter towards sun) haze layer boundaries (indicated by black arrows). There also appears to be a definite brighter haze or upper cloud layer seen at 315 and at 45 (not shown). 'Course this is also towards the London megalopolis.

[There appears to be a darker layer towards the sun also, so I don't think these are image artifacts.]

-Mike

I think I am starting to get SAS after watching the videos a few times.

And it was still less than 1/3 of the way up to space.

Congrats on the successful mission.

I'd be interested to see what people would change in terms of pointing, orientation, and image sequencing with just the one camera for future flights - and if they could have a second camera, what they'd do with it.

Doug

Well, one suggestion that comes to mind when looking at the images would be to have one camera as is or even tilt it downward ever so slightly, while the other pointing near-nadir, say at a 90 deg angle to the first one. The panorama is, after all, missing the central portion.

Since the second cam would be looking almost straight down pretty much all the time, there'd be no need to capture as many images that just end up being rotated. Maybe longer movies instead?

Well this goes back to all those sims I did back in the old UMSFB thread. With one camera I think as is was about perfect. If I got to add a second camera then for sure it needs to point downish. Thinking back to my sims, I would suggest having it in 'portrait' orientation with the lower edge close but not quite nadir (centre of image about -50 degrees elevation (FOV is ~53 degrees, so this would capture ~-24 to -76 degrees elevation in level flight)

Maybe it's time to break out that sim code again now we have more data on how the balloon really behaves.

I don't know about this specific flight -- maybe Doug or James Coxon can say -- but on the Pegasus wiki for a previous flight there's this description of the permission/notice procedure.

It seemed that when the limb was thinner (more black sky, soooo cool) the exposure setting function would blow out the horizon.

If there was any way possible with hardware or software to dampen down the exposure changes....

-Mike

Without risking under-exposing the other images - no. We could bracket-expose images, but that trebles the data volume and probably wouldn't get the range anyway. It's just one of those things. Take enough shots such that yeah, you'll get loads of over exposed dark images, but you still get enough good ones.

Doug

Wow
It's an amazing work. Really impress by pictures taken during the ascending of HAPS-1.
Doug and other, you made a GREAT work .

Love the last part of the second edited movie, when the wind dicrease, it's a moment of serenity .

Can't think of much else I would do different. All things considered this was a most amazing first-time effort. Darn near perfect when you consider the goals outlined in that earlier balloon discussion.

Perhaps some additional instrumentation would add to the experience next time, like a rudimentary accelerometer. Maybe some kind of radiation or cosmic-ray detecting device.

What wind speed hit still the payload box in the flight with the balloon? It isn't nearly zero, is it?

If you get still enough wind on the box, I would start/search some tests on the compact form of the box in order to get the rotation under better control. Maybe it could be even possible to control a desired speed and direction of the rotation during some time of the flight.
How about a compact rugby-ball-like form, maybe such deformed that you get a desired rotation? In this context it would be also relevant how the payload box is connected to the balloon/parachute cord - fixed or turnable.

Anything from 0 kph to more than 100, and it can change very quickly as we rise thru different layers. Sunday there was almost no jet-stream - but sometimes it can be >100kph - and you could go from 0-100 in a mintue or two.

WE go up at about 10-15kph, BUT, anything you put on the payload to use that 15kph to rotate ( like the fins on Huygens) is going to influence the payload via the cross-winds far far more than the wind of ascent.

Doug