Close enough to outer space

[mmcirvin]

My friend Phil Wherry told me about this excellent project of the Vienna (Virginia) Wireless Society in which they sent a balloon up to 98,000 feet (about 30 km) from Front Royal, with radio telemetry and a couple of digital cameras taking pictures. The sky gets awfully black up there and you can see clear across Chesapeake Bay.

The balloon then popped and the payload apparently fell into a tree in Orange County, Virginia southeast of Culpeper (by parachute, I think), with at least one of the cameras still running.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Nice view of the Earth's curvature, but you may know (and I may have said before) you don't need to go that high to be noticeably looking down on the whole Earth. You could measure the Earth's radius by taking some simple surveying tools up an island mountaintop. I'm guessing that atmospheric refraction would lead to an overestimate, though.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yes, and if jet airliner windows were bigger, you could probably detect the curvature of the horizon pretty easily from cruising height by eyeballing it against a yardstick.

Spherical Earth movies

[iayork.livejournal.com]

The movie is enough to give motion sickness. Oooooog.

Actually I should ask you about this. I've been looking for something much like what I thought the balloon-cam movie would be like: A movie of a rocket launch, or something like that, that shows the Earth receding into the distance and becoming obviously spherical. William has a general understanding of the spherical Earth, but I don't think he has it in context of himself, and scale, and so on; I think showing the whole thing all together, from right on the ground to in orbit, would help get the picture across. I've poked around various satellite-imagery and space-photo sites without finding such a thing. Anything jump to mind?

Re: Spherical Earth movies

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I don't know of any really clean examples of this-- the best things I know are not real movies but computer simulations with something like Google Earth or Celestia.