After eight months of research and testing, photographer Luke Geissbühler and his children attached an HD camera to a weather balloon and sent it off into space from Newburgh, New York, reaching 100,000 feet and recording space before plummeting back down to Earth.
As stated near the beginning of the video:
The mission was to attach a HD video camera to a weather balloon and send it up into the upper stratosphere to film the blackness beyond our earth.
Eventually, the balloon will grow from lack of atmospheric pressure, burst, and being to fall.
It would have to survive 100 mph winds, temperatures of 60 degrees below zero, speeds of over a 150 mph, and the high risk of a water landing.
(It did.)
A GPS device and parachute were built into the design in order to retrieve the craft after it landed. The team found the craft in a tree, fifty feet high, by locating its blinking external LED light in the darkness of night.
As the end of the incredibly awesome video states, “This thing went to space.”
In the near future: Maybe someone will do this using HDR video?
(Photojojo! and Lori Dorn via Laughing Squid)
