So once again its been far too long since my last post. I'm not very good with these things. Since the last post lots has happened. I became increasingly aware of the complication of launching a weather balloon with so little experience. I have therefore teamed up with some guys from the 'Kiwi Space Foundation' who have far more experience and are generally far smarter than me. We are in full pre production for this project and currently designing and constructing the payload. We are aiming to launch within the next month but cant be sure. I am also making a documentary about this project, exploring why people attempt projects like this. Additionally, the documentary will include footage from 100,000ft, assuming we recover the payload upon landing. I will post the documentary when it is finished.
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So, a long time has passed since I have taken the time to write any updates in our project. Needless to say we have all been very busy with university projects and assignments; however, we have still been able to dedicate some small amounts of time towards this project.
Still, what seems to be troubling us the most, at this stage, is camera equipment. The time from takeoff to peak altitude can vary and is dependent on different factors. At this point we are aiming to accommodate for at least 2 and half hours footage. The more the better, however. The GoPro HD can handle this if we use large SD cards and an external battery pack. But do we want the GoPro!? The images look great for its size and out of all the cameras we’ve been looking at it seems to provide the nicest picture. However, it has a fisheye lens. This is something we feel may not be appropriate for this project as it would create distortion in the earth’s curvature at its high altitudes. Pondering on whether the GoPro is the right choice, we decided it would be advantageous to rig up two HD cameras (unknown what yet) and stitch the footage together later to create a panorama video. This would look cooler than a fisheye image and would still provide a large amount of area captured. The only problem now is we don’t know what cameras to use... the new Key Ring Spy Camera is cool and cheap, however it only films in 720 and we want the full 1080p for this. So...this is where we are at. We are still searching for cameras that provide a full HD image, have a nice picture, are cost effective, light weight and can have an external power supply... well get there eventually :) Any suggestions would be appreciated. |
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