ardly:
@ChrisTenone That is a fantastic photograph. What exactly are we seeing?
Thanks ardly!
It's a go pro image taken at the moment of the balloon's burst. The flare in the top left of the picture is talcum powder, which is put in the balloon prior to filling (with hydrogen.) That way, when it bursts, it makes a small sparkly cloud that can be seen from the ground. The string with the boxes are the payloads - our balloons can carry about 17 pounds, so we have anywhere from 4 to 10 payloads. Each one has an experiment or two onboard. The bright part in the bottom right half of the picture is the Earth - Arizona to be exact - we launch from the University of Arizona farm in Maricopa, Arizona, because it is rural or raw desert for many miles in every direction. It appears curved because - duh - the planet is spherical, but the curvature is emphasized from the GoPro's barrel distortion. but it's almost flat - any line that passes through the center will be rendered rectilinearly. When I measure this picture, it's about 3% more curved than it actually is at this altitude (96,000 feet.)
Here are a couple more pictures, the first one is the launch. Each payload team has a representative in the line (ours is the fourth from the right):
Next is a sequence of the recovery. The entire flight is between half an hour and an hour. We've tried a bunch of stuff, and the best seems to be a lora broadcasting gps data and an identifier code. That way we get a location, and drive, 4 wheel, and hike to retrieve it. It takes anywhere from an hour to a day and a half to recover the capsule. Over 8 launches, we have recovered all but one, although one recovery was little more than pieces of what used to be the student's semester long project. But this one was intact, and the gopro kept right on snapping:
