Arizona lads recover epic stratovid – two years after launch

A groups of lads from Arizona has posted a nice vid of a balloon flight over the US's majestic southwest – having finally recovered the footage two years after their payload went AWOL in the desert. Bryan Chan, Ved Chirayath, Ashish Goel, Paul Tarantino and Tyler Reid sent a GoPro Hero3, Sony camcorder and Samsung Galaxy …

[Anonymous Coward]

Curvature

These balloons go less than 100km up.

The earth's radius is 6400 km.

So why does the Earth's curvature looks so large in videos like this one ?

Is it an artifact of the lens system or something, or does the Earth really appear that much more curved from a place only 1/64th higher than ground level ?

[Lester Haines]

Re: Curvature

That's the wide-angle view from the GoPro. Entirely artificial curvature.

[Steven Raith]

Re: Curvature

"Entirely artificial curvature."

You saying the earth is flat?

/me runs

Steven R

[Elmer Phud]

Re: Curvature

You sayin' it's not flat?

[Martin Summers]

Re: Curvature

It's actually disc shaped, or so I read somewhere anyway.

[Captain DaFt]

Re: Curvature

"It's actually disc shaped, or so I read somewhere anyway."

Common misconception.

Actually, it's dish shaped. That's why all the water doesn't run off the edges.

[Mike Flugennock]

Re: Curvature

If you check out some of the photography from the X-15 altitude record flights and the early Mercury suborbital flights, the curvature of the Earth is quite evident from about the 100km neighborhood.

Still, it's not quite as curved as it's shown in the video; this is, in fact, an artifact of the GoPro lens.

[Soap Distant]

Re: Curvature

It's hollow

SD

[Tom 7]

Lucky buggers

I cant even find my phone in the kitchen. Mind you it doesnt get a signal there either...

[DJV]

Re: Lucky buggers

Try putting it in the lounge.

[CAPS LOCK]

Wide angle distortion or no, impressive footage.

Also respect for honest finder!

[Steve Evans]

Relying on the mobile phone company's coverage map!!!

Oh the innocence of youth!

[ItsNotMe]

Huh?

"The phone landed ~50 miles away from the launch point, from what I recall. It's a really far distance considering there's hardly any roads over there!".

What does the fact that the phone...sent up by a balloon...and landed ~50 miles away...have anything to do with "... there's hardly any roads over there!"?

[Sir Sham Cad]

Re: Huh?

Simple.

There's no straighforward route to take in order to retrieve the phone even though it's only 50 miles away from launch point as the balloon flies.

The balloon and payload can fly. The humans on the other hand, are stuck using roads.

[Peter2]

Re: Huh?

50 Miles on road is a 2 hour round trip by car, including the time to find it at the end point.

50 Miles off road is realistically a minimum of a 4 day round trek by foot while carrying about your own weight in camping equipment and water, assuming that anybody will walk into a sodding desert (hot, poor walking surfaces, poor water resupply, less than 100% chance of surviving the walk)

[Dave Bell]

Re: Huh?

It's quite possible to cover fifty miles off-road with a 50-year-old Land Rover. It's not problem-free, and the US government, for some reason, doesn't like Land Rovers. And it's close to a hundred years since the British Army started swanning around deserts in motor cars. Ground clearance and gear ratios matter more than four-wheel drive.

[Anonymous Coward]

Pi r**2

They did not know it was 50 miles away until it was found. Even then, a 50 mile radius from point of launch is almost 8,000 square miles of 'trackless waste'.

Tough to find something the size of a dead badger in that big an area.

[nsld]

Re: Pi r**2

Get Brian May on the case, he sees dead badgers everywhere!

[Sporkinum]

Distortion

The HAB pictures coming from wide angle lenses always bothers me. If you watch the videos you can watch it change with the way the lens happens to be pointing. sometimes the horizon is convex, like these pictures, sometimes it is flat or concave. Rarely does it show the true view. The cool thing is the black sky that really shows how much atmosphere the balloon is above.

[Lester Haines]

Re: Distortion

It's a trade-off. Balloon payloads tend to move around a lot. If you used a lens, say equivalent to 50mm in old money, the view would be moving across the frame so fast it'd be unwatchable. The wide angle mitigates that, albeit with the concave/convex effect.

[Cynic_999]

Re: Distortion

So why not mount the camera in a gyroscopically stabilised gimbal? Surely not particularly difficult to achieve - with a little cunning it would even be possible to keep the gimbal struts out of shot.

[Lester Haines]

Re: Re: Distortion

Why not? Weight and batteries. More weight bad, more batteries to clap out equally bad. Plus the gimbal has to work at -50 degs C. More trouble than it's worth, I reckon.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Distortion

Not a 'wide angle' lens issue; this is a CHEAP AND LIGHTWEIGHT wide angle lens issue. Barrel distortion this bad doesn't exist in SLR lenses... of course those cost more and weigh more than a the entire gopro. My 20mm Nikkor f2.8 has minimal distortion, but weighs 9.8 ounces and costs over $500; both about twice what a gopro clocks in at.

The further away from the mid-line of the lens, the worse the distortion.

Note: this is not the same thing as the distortion you get with a 'fisheye' lens, where that sort of distortion is expected (and in some cases valued).

[x 7]

if the earth is flat, does that mean the sky is as well?

[Anonymous Coward]

No the sky is a dome or a series of transparent domes where the various planets are supported - known since medieval days at least - keep up