Adventures in High Altitude Ballooning
Space: the final frontier, we came close to it with a balloon and have pictures to prove it. The idea is to launch a weather balloon with an attached camera to try and get pictures from near space. I have Reddit to thank for this as that is where I read the original article that started off this adventure. As a tribute, the balloon was named ReHAB, this was suggested by Reddit user Maxd and stands for Reddit High Altitude Balloon.
Sure, this has been done before but in this case I wanted to make it as simple as possible and to track the balloon in real time without needing a special amateur radio license. Cost was an issue but not the primary one; I did not want to make this as cheap as possible, rather my concern was to reduce the complexity and make this easy for others to do. With that in mind I’m going to explain all the steps right down to the basic details in my next post in the hopes it helps more people launch their own near space adventure, this post will just cover the story of the launch.
“Hey, the weather looks good for Sunday” was the message that greeted me when I logged on to IRC. This was Gussy, part of the balloon team and a fullsize hotair balloon pilot so he’s good at judging the winds. I open the balloon trajectory website, put in the coordinates for Melbourne, Australia along with our balloon data and sure enough it’s perfect. As the wind is a southerly it means our balloon can be launched near the city without it going out to sea, which is great as we don’t have a boat.
Launching near the city is exactly what we wanted, firstly it means we can get interesting pictures early on in the flight and secondly as its an early morning launch, it means I can stay in bed longer. The trajectory calculator estimates a landing in the area of Shepparton, which is about 100km north of Melbourne. Its now late Thursday afternoon, this gives me Friday and Saturday to get some Helium.