Christian_and_sara_prepping

Storms rolled through town Thursday night. When they left, they took the breeze with them. I was on campus all day, and the still treetops called to me, “Launch your balloons today.” But there was too much to do to get ready for the three-day camp next week. Launching the balloons would be too much fun to feel right.

But then the new camera arrived: the GoPro HD Motorsports HERO Camera. This rock solid, shock-proof, light-weight unit would give us better quality pictures, but it wouldn’t be as satisfying to use as the Aries + PICAXE camera rig that we built ourselves. I gave the camera to Christian to figure out, and by 5:30pm, Christian, Sara, and I were prepping the balloon rig over slices of Hawaiian pizza.

The camera can take all sorts of types of photos, but we choose to have it take one photo per second. By the time we were done walking the balloon around campus like some sort of buoyant trio of dogs, we had about 3000 JPEGs to sort through. Here is a selection.

Chall_and_franklin

Magruder_and_north

Over_pickler

Planetarium

Quad

The GoPro camera is great. I’m looking forward to playing with it more at high and low elevations.

Just for fun, I took a bunch of pics the GoPro took and made a little movie of reeling the balloons to the ground.

reeling_it_in_3.mov

Watch it here.