This flight was for a BBC TV show to be aired around Easter next year, with the aim to educate and inspire children to learn to code and to perhaps take up programming as a profession. This is a very worthy cause, especially with the current situation where the quantity […]
Read MoreHigh AlTedTude Flight
Back in June 2006 a guy called Steve Carter posted this in the pistonheads.com photographic forum I decided to send my tiny teddy bear on a world trip (via post to other people) and get photos of him in as many different & interesting places (maybe doing daft things) as […]
Read MoreBest HAB Photo Ever?
Someone (apart from me!) thinks so, according to a comment on my flickr account! Also the same photo (see below) is now on Steve Randall’s Random Engineering site. So to return the favour, if you’re planning your own weather balloon flight, the best place for balloons, parachutes and other bits […]
Read MoreThe HAB Olympics
The plan for flights started when fellow HABber Mark Jessop suggested we fly two balloons, mine with Hydrogen and his with Helium, to see which gets higher and by how much. The maths gives a certain figure but recent flights in the UK seem to show that hydrogen does rather […]
Read MoreTed lands in Elstead
Back in May 2011, before even my first launch, I was at the Smithsonian Air & Space museum in Washington DC and spotted one of these cute little potential astronauts: Back then I was still building my first and very conventional payload, but I bought it anyway for a possible […]
Read More5th Hucknall Scout Group Flight
About 2 months ago I received a message via this blog, from scout leader Andrew Anderson of 5th Hucknall Scouts, asking for help with a HAB project he and his scouts had planned. Some surprise monetary restrictions meant that having purchased a GoPro camera for their flight, they had nothing […]
Read MorePIE1 – Raspberry Pi Sends Live Images from Near Space
HAB (High Altitude Ballooning) is a growing hobby where enthusiasts use standard weather balloons to put small payloads typically 100g-1kg into “near space” at altitudes of around 30km or so, carrying a tracking device (so the balloon position is known throughout the flight) and usually some sensors (temperature, pressure etc) […]
Read MoreBUZZ6 Flight – To The World Record and Behind
For Buzz6 I wanted to make the lightest payload I can, to try and beat the world altitude record. That record was in the hands of Steve Randall who’d beaten the previous record a couple of weeks before. I helped with that a little, including driving Steve from Cambs to […]
Read MoreBUZZ5 and CLOUD5 Flights
Usually my flights have been from my home village in Berkshire, but for a while I’ve been wanting to launch with other enthusiasts from one of the 2 permanently NOTAMed sites in Cambridgeshire. Also, another enthusiast (also called Dave – hereafter known as Dave B) wanted to fly his first […]
Read MoreBuzz Lightyear’s Space Walk
This was a more ambitious launch day than previously, with 2 flights and 3 payloads. Also it was the first time I had put items outside of the payloads to photograph, and the first time I’d used hydrogen. It was a joint launch with fellow “balloonist” Anthony Stirk who had […]
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