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.