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 …
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 ?
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.
"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!"?
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)
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.
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.
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).
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