We love this kind of stuff. A bunch of Edmonton radio enthusiasts (that’s Edmonton, USA, not the grimy north London suburb) bodged together a DIY video platform on a balloon and sent it soaring upwards on a mission to film the edge of space.
The mission, dubbed BEAR-4 (Balloon Experiments with Amateur Radio), involved wedging a video camera in a box protected by foam blocks, and hooking it up to five AAA Lithium L91 battery cells to provide nearly four and half hours of footage.
The video was shot on a Canon Vixio-HF camcorder attached to a 1800g hydrogen balloon, and the 3.84lbs package managed to survive the journey and successfully record the first amateur video at 107,145 feet.
At that altitude there’s no air to conduct sound, so there’s a peaceful, Zen like silence takes over before the balloon bursts, and the camera assembly starts its descent back to earth.
You can see the highlights below:
Wow, that’s an incredible piece of footage.
I love the bit where the balloon silently pops up in space!
@John Chatton
That video is amazing. Edmonton however is in Canada. This is the second amateur video from the edge of space in recent weeks. The first one was on 2 September and was carried out by two students of MIT. This was the American video. The camera was also a Canon but in this case a still camera set to record video.
The second video was taken on the 24 Sept as stated and this time used a Canon video camera a Vixeo. This was the Canadian response to the earlier experiment.
This isn’t the MIT students package or video, this is the proper Bear-4 launch Video. This also wasn’t launched Sept 24th as Hocus noted, but its from August 24th, a week before before the MIT students launch. The MIT students sent up a still camera and captured still pictures they converted into a time lapse video, this is the HD video from our launch. Just wanted to clear up a couple of points lol, many congrats to the MIT students on their flight, its always great to see people do great things, and there is more than enough “space” for all of us!