High Altitude Balloon Videos

About

High altitude object videos are a series of videos depicting the view of the Earth from an high altitude of the atmosphere. These videos are typically made by using a DIY high altitude object, such as weather balloons, a digital recording device and a GPS tracker. In the United States, these balloons are regulated by the Federal Aviation Administration under FAR101 restrictions.

Origin

Human attempts at high altitude exploration of near space dates back to 1783, when French professor of Physics Jacques Charles launched hydrogen-filled balloons in the sky in a highly publicized event.^[1] The technology took a leap forward in the 1980s with the development of Amateur Radio High Altitude Ballooning (ARHAB)^[2], pioneered by amateur radio hobbyist Bill Brown with his first launch on August 15th, 1987. A series of similar experiments known as Balloon Experiments with Amateur Radio (BEAR) were launched in May 2000 by a group of Canadian amateur radi operators from Edmonton, Alberta.

The ARHAB programs remained mostly an exclusive activity for scientific research purposes until the latter half of the 2000s, when the costs of Global Positioning System (GPS) technology and digital cameras began to fall. As a result, high altitude ballooning became a more common hobby among amateurs and space enthusiasts. Some of the earliest clips of recorded footage were uploaded onto the website of CosmoCam^[9], a project developed by Rocket Science Inc. in collaboration with NASA and the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility.

Spread

In April 2007, one of the earliest DIY balloon projects was launched by MAKE Magazine writer Bre Pettis, though he was unable to retrieve the balloons upon landing. Pettis’ project was throughly documented through a series of blog posts on MAKE magazine website.^[10]

Months later in October that same year, Alexei Karpenko^[5] successfully documented his own flight using a system consisting of GPS, camera, sensors and communications. The balloon took panoramic pictures and videos during the course of its travel and reached the maximum altitude of 30 kilometers before descending.

  

Along with a detailed description of the preparations, photos and videos from the journey were published in a blog post, which spawned over 9,900 comments. The story was picked up and reblogged by tech news blog BoingBoing^[3] later that month.

Beginning in early 2008, numerous other amateur-made videos of high altitude balloon flights were uploaded onto video-sharing sites like YouTube^[8] and Vimeo.^[11] A number of commercial brands like Toshiba, Google Droid and even Natural Ice beer have adopted the format as part of their viral marketing campaigns.

In September 2009, a group of MIT students led by Justin Lee and Oliver Yeh launched a Canon A470 compact camera with a weather balloon into the stratosphere, which became known as the Project Icarus. The story was covered by numerous tech news sites like Wired^[12] and CNN due to its low cost, totaling at $150 in equipment purchases.

Notable Examples

The caliber of image quality varies across a wide range from mobile camera resolution to high-definition; some equipments carry toy figurines and other small objects onboard for decoration purposes.

Search Interest

External References