Hello, my name is Eric Madigan, and this blog is a photo journal of a small, unmanned weather balloon and camera I made one summer. To this day, I am surprised that it actually worked. The design was basically comprised of a small Styrofoam beer cooler, a digital camera that I programmed with a bootable script, a pay-as-you-go cell phone with GPS, and a 600g weather balloon.

The balloon and camera was launched into the atmosphere from geographic location 32.733953, -116.006109 on August 20, 2010, and, after reaching terminal velocity (32ft/sec/sec), landed here after completing a successful 3 hour flight:



Pictures taken during it's flight:






in the photo above you will see a large body of water to the left of the clouds. That is the Sea of Cortez. if you look down from there, you'll see El Centro and the Mexican bordering town, Mexicali. The US/Mexican border is actually distinguishable.







Balloon burst at an altitude of ~24 miles


If you have any questions, shoot me an email: eric.madigan@gmail.com