We launched on Tuesday, December 30th. At the last minute we decided to remove the emergency cut down system. The fear was that the leakage over the mosfet transistor would end up melting the monofilament line and dropping our payload early.
There was virtually no wind. A good thing as inflating the balloon was a little more complicated than I anticipated.
We stood around watching the balloon go up through 10,000 feet. It seemed like it wasn’t going far. Then it hit the jet stream and started moving at 100MPH and we ended up 40 or more miles behind the balloon. The good news is that radio transmissions were good that far away and as soon as the balloon got above the jet stream we started catching up.
The backup cell/SMS/GPS tracker did not get a satellite signal inside the ice chest. Good thing we did not need it.
The peak altitude was almost 110,000 feet and we got clear telemetry data at that altitude.
The payload landed in a tree and was not easy to get down. Luckily all the equipment was in good working order after the drop of nearly 60 feet when it fell out of the tree with no parachute.
Will –The bald guy in the video 
was a huge help with this and Francesco was as well. Francesco is in Italy and responded to some posts I made on the CHDK forums. He decided to just write the program himself so all of the credit for the nice pictures goes to him. If you look at other missions you will notice less than half the pictures are descent. More than 90% of ours were fantastic. I’m very glad we had someone with some real photography experience helping out.
This is a link to a panorama Francesco built. Absolutely amazing! It needs the devalVR 3D Browser plugin
http://www.francescobonomi.it/icbnn/medium.html
| Launch | |||
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| Climbing and portions of the flight over the gulf | |||
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| Notice the sky is getting darker now and look for the jet well below the balloon in the third picture. | |||
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| These pictures are at altitude. The last one shows balloon shredding so we can assume thats pretty much the peak altitude. |  |
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| These pictures are at the recovery site. Near Lake Butler Florida. |  |
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Nice update!
I’m still in awe!
Guys, that was amazing!
Sunning results!
Great shots!
BTW, images 81, 82 and 83 show the St. Marks Wildlife Refuge and the St. Mark lighthouse at the end of the point of land (follow the road to the coast).
Great photos. Nice job guys. Can’t wait to see the next project with the rocket launch.
Have you considered some kind of stabilizer for the rocket launch portion?
That’s pretty awesome.
Are you by chance related to the Donald Shrum who used to teach drafting at Rickards?
Yep, thats my dad. You can send me an email at donald_shrum@yahoo.com if you’d like.
Thanks for sharing, Dena! The whole family enjoyed the videos, and the pictures were awesome!
Congratulations! What an amazing project. I would love to see how those images look in Photosyth. 1500 probably wouldn’t work but if you can find a machine with 4Gb RAM you can probably do 600 or so at a time.
Good luck on your next attempt!
- k
You guys have produced absolutely stunning results! This experiment really makes you think. I wonder why wasn’t this experiment done 100 years ago with film cameras?
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hmmm nice i love it but i guess you should make a stabilizer that you can control so you can see what you want just a simple one use it from the hover craft (mini) you can control your movement and many more good luck for next project, mail me at harepikle[@]yahoo.com if you make the next project i will watch it if you upload it