The badger icon on the actual PCB is the very same Badger of Badger-Badger-Badger fame as in that picture

Fingers crossed - it's going to go up from a .ac.uk connection.

For reasons of pure server practicaltiy - I'm going to hand the complete data set over to James (for obvious reasons ) - but I want to ask for restraint from everyone else. I will put ALL the movies onto the web via Youtube and Vimeo, and I will put lots of stills up here and elsewhere. But it's simply not sensible or sustainable to say "come on down, get the whole 7 gig" to a large number of people. I hope people understand. It's not about being a bit 'ESA' with the data - I'll do my best to use whatever sensible means there are for everyone to see as much of it as possible - but if I call an open-house on it all, the people who really need it, wont be able to get it, and so the beautiful pans etc wont be as rapidly forthcoming.

Doug

Once all the stills are down and the movies are down, I'll sort out something on Vimeo for you to start seing it. There's a LOT of very dark, very blurred frames ( so people who want to download them all just as a matter of stamp-collecting would be wasting their time) - however later on there are some great images - such as this one.

Doug - "The badger icon on the actual PCB is the very same Badger of Badger-Badger-Badger fame as in that picture".

That's an amazing coincidence. I just picked him from a random Google search because he was cute.
Well done to Ed and Doug and everyone who worked on this project. It was incredible to watch as events unfolded.
It'd be kinda nice if we could have Google Maps giving up to the moment movements on the Rovers (although at times there'd be little movement of course!)

I just thought I'd post this desktop wallpaper tribute to Badger for all the team. Thanks for a fascinating day.
Can't wait to see the movies and images.
Click to view attachment

Astro0

It could take ages to sort through this lot - so I've just done an iWeb gallery of a bunch of nice stills from the flight.

http://gallery.me.com/djellison/100034

Speechless...

Airbag

That alone made the entire effort worthwhile. Just gorgeous!.

Doug,

I am very proud and amazed at the accomplishments UK Balloon Teams this past week... and to see these fabulous pictures is just a thrill.

Monitoring this flight across the globe in real time, pictures in near real time, telemetry for analysis...it is something I could not have dreamed of when I was a boy...or even your age!

You have talked the talk (unmanned space flight) and now you have walked the walk!

You Guys Rock

Incredible and amazing
The images are gorgeous. We can see lights of cities at the ground, under clouds layer while at high altitude sun is rising .

In some of the early movies - that's just about all you can see

Doug

Outstanding imagery, it pretty much met my (high) expectations. Are those full resolution images?

Just got back from a fairly killer motorway journey, and i was pretty tired already. Coffee has fixed me though.

I have wanted to get the sun touching the earth for so, so, so long now. I have had a smile on my face all day. And this is just the raw images, before the extremely talented people here on UMSF have had a chance to work their magic. I cannot wait! Flight computer logs will be put up asap, + conversions to KMLs etc.

Stunningly beautiful!

What's the name of the that star being occulted by the limb?

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.

Doug

Cool! You can see jet contrails!

Check out 80% of the way to the horizon in http://gallery.me.com/djellison#100034/IMG...p;bgcolor=black

-Mike

My new desktop background of the 25th, following the first flight, has just been replaced.

Lovely images, team!

Andy

Videos will be on Vimeo this time. Probably 10 movies. It'll take most of the night for them to appear.

For each camera, two ascent movies (the 20s movie clips run together) and one descent movie, and then one ascent and one descent movie of stills.

I think I see an APOD candidate here.

I'm seeing an National Geographic article. Ask a Nat. Geo. photographer along for next launch to document the proceedings!

Airbag

Balloon Burst at Apogee ( About 32.8km ) seen from the Nova A560 camera
http://vimeo.com/1626665

Now that defiantly went BANG!

This is the dawn of a new era. Congratulations.


Paolo Amoroso

OK there is a HUGE amount of data to go through, it's still downloading! But here is a 360 degree horizon panorama to keep you going.





Congrats to the team for another amazing flight!

Very inspiring and beautifull pictures. No other words come to my mind.

Not too shabby James.


All the descent movies from the HAPS-D side - http://vimeo.com/1626812
and the Nova 8 side - http://vimeo.com/1628414

The three Nova ascent vids are done and up. Just got to make the three HAPS-D ascent movies before switching to stills.

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

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)

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/

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.

"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?

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

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

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.)

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

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

Yes, I believe it is the moon.

You sure it isn't Saturn
Click to view attachment
(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.)

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

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.

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

Whilst I understand the issue of "stamp collectors" downloading everything and taking bandwidth from those who are going to do something useful with the images, JTN's index page does offer a different, and I think very interesting, perspective on this really exciting mission.

Scrolling down the page of thumbnails give a fascinating narrative of the whole mission, from set-up to landfall, in a way that selected images do not. In a strange way it is a little reminiscent of http://www.tenbyten.org.

It also enabled me to find one or two images of pre-dawn contrails against the pre-dawn sky. I suppose not surprising given that a major airway runs across the south of Essex from the VOR at Clacton towards Heathrow - albeit at a rather lower altitude - but a nice catch all the same.

Really well done to all involved -can't wait to the next flight!

Rob

This is why I made this :

http://vimeo.com/1628991

Note, in the bottom right corner, you can download a MOV so you can scrub back and forth thru a med-res version of every still.

To be honest, I resent the very existence of the setup stills, they're eating SD card capacity before we launch and I could turn up the length of movies and number of stills if the payload didn't have to be prepared 30 mins or so before the launch. Hence, I don't include them in the movie versions.

Doug,

Yes, understand the frustration of wasted SD space. Clearly, some sort of switch on the outside of the flight package to turn the camera on at the last minute before launch would add complexity and a pretty obvious -and likely- failure mode.

What size are the camera image files with a lens cap in place? Obviously a JPEG of a completely black image should be smaller. Trouble is if the camera cranks up the gain and produces a noisy frame under these circumstances -then it makes for a larger file size! If the file size *was* significantly smaller with the lens capped you could attach a "remove before flight" banner to the lens cap (as with pitot tube covers on planes) to ensure that it was remove before flight and save yourself some memory.

What size SD care are you using?

Rob

The largest they'll take - 4GB

Doug