As I pause this year, to reflect on the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I am wrestling with the notion that many Americans still hold: that today is primarily a African American or “black” holiday. While Dr. King’s struggles were rooted in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, his words can be read in any context for inspiration. His message of opposition to injustice through non-violence and civil disobedience, coupled with his optimism for humanity, spans all colors, religions and cultures.

It can seem easy to look back with disdain on now defunct institutions of injustice such as legalized segregation in the United States or apartheid in South Africa. However, there are many such unjust institutions that persist today which continue to strip dignity and rights from vast groups of people be it blacks, gays, Hispanics and even women. In the context of these modern injustices, we are often afraid as individuals to sound too political or divisive and so we as a society allow these inequities to continue.

If we do not teach our children the wider value of this holiday and we fail to impart the same fervor for justice for all people that Dr. King preached for the races divided in the 1960s, we ignore the context of what his words mean in the present. When we focus strictly on Dr. King’s speeches as they relate to segregation 45 years ago, we ignore what he would most definitely say about the injustices that persist today.

As we celebrate Dr. King’s legacy this year, let us not forget that his dream is not realized until all people, not just blacks and whites, have come together as brothers and sisters.

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AAHAB-1 reached an altitude greater than 90,000 feet overlooking the Central Coast, San Luis Obispo Bay and the Pismo Dunes.

• See more photos in the Facebook album.
• S.B. News-Press: Students explore atmosphere with balloon-equipped camera
• S.B. Independent: Anacapa School Skirts the Stratosphere
• KCLU Public Radio: Lance Orozco’s radio feature story
• S.B. EdHat: Anacapa School’s Launch a Success
• Noozhawk: Anacapa School Project Soars to Stratospheric Heights — Then Lands Safely

The Anacapa School’s Near Space Exploration Club (ANSEC) successfully recovered its high-altitude balloon after a weekend flight, which returned stunning photos and environmental data from the Earth’s upper atmosphere.

On Saturday, May 21, 2011, at 9:43 a.m., ANSEC members Julio Bernal, Aubrey Cazabat, Christian Eckert and Connor Proctor along with faculty advisor Levi Maaia launched the club’s first near space balloon probe, AAHAB-1, from a site east of Paso Robles in the small community of Shandon, Calif. The group’s mission was to gather photos and environmental data as the balloon passed through the stratosphere.

The ANSEC team calculated the balloon's lift in order to ensure the craft would climb quickly.

After the probe’s two-hour and 10-minute flight over the California Central Coast, the team recovered the payload in rural Kings County, Calif., twenty miles northeast of the launch site.

“We worked so hard on this project,” said senior Aubrey Cazabat. “It was such an amazing feeling to see the capsule back on the ground and to know that we had done it!”

From the top of the balloon’s 91,122-foot ascent above 99 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere, the camera had a view as far as 400 miles in all directions under a black, near space sky. The capsule’s GPS radio tracking signal was heard by amateur radio stations as far away as San Diego and Mendocino Counties.

After beginning this project in the late fall, the Anacapa students quickly learned that they had a steep learning curve ahead as they tackled challenges from wind and flight path prediction to engineering a sturdy but lightweight capsule that could survive brutally cold conditions and hurricane-force winds. Despite these hurdles, the club achieved all of its goals and retrieved extensive environmental data, including temperature, humidity, barometric pressure and radiation exposure levels, along with stunning photos of Earth’s curved surface.

“We picked up some ice on the camera window, which can be seen in a few of the higher level shots,” said senior Connor Proctor. “Other than that, all of our critical systems worked flawlessly.”

Data from the flight, including photos, a map of the flight path and environmental data, can be found at the school’s Web site www.anacapaschool.org.

Anacapa School is an independent, co-educational, WASC–accredited, college preparatory day school for junior high and high school students in grades 7-12. Founded in 1981 by Headmaster Gordon Sichi, Anacapa enjoys the best student-teacher ratio of any school, public or private, in Santa Barbara at its historic campus located in the heart of the Santa Barbara civic center.

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Yesterday, Lance Orozco from the NPR affiliate station in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties came to the Anacapa School to interview my students and me about our plans to launch the Anacapa Amateur High Altitude Balloon 1 (AAHAB-1) on Saturday.  His story aired this morning on KCLU.

Listen to KCLU’s radio news story (mp3 | 6m 31s)

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Over the past few years the proliferation of GPS-enabled devices, as well as compact and light-weight digital photography, has helped give bloom to a burgeoning movement of amateur balloonists.  These are not the Around the World in 80 Days-types that hope to circumnavigate the globe in a luxury appointed airship, but rather groups of hackers and makers who combine smart phones and Arduinos to create sophisticated weather balloons for a fraction of the cost traditionally spent by the National Weather Service and the U.S. military to explore the upper atmosphere.  Near space, specifically the region of the Earth’s atmosphere between 65,000 and 100,000 feet above sea level (MSL), is the destination of choice for these amateur explorers.

Just about six months ago, four high school students from Anacapa School and I began planning to launch a high altitude balloon.  Anacapa School is not the first educational group to attempt a flight like this (college-age MIT students from the 1337arts group claim to have done it for $150 in 2009), but we are certainly the first high school club in this region to organize a student-run flight.  Our group, the Anacapa Near Space Exploration Club (ANSEC), decided that its radiosonde should contain the typical digital camera as well as a number of additional instruments to measure barometric pressure, temperature, humidity and even radiation levels in the environment both inside and outside of the four-pound foam cooler.

Few Earth-bound objects ever find their way up to the thin air of 100,000 feet MSL, the altitude at which we expect our balloon will burst and begin its return to the surface.  A typical jet airliner tops off below 40,000 feet and even the most powerful military jets are just now finding their way above 60,000 ft.  At its apex over Central California, AAHAB-1′s onboard camera will be able to see (assuming clear skies and high visibility) from San Francisco to Mexico to Las Vegas, over 400 miles in all directions, while the barometer will measure less than one percent of the atmospheric pressure found at sea level (99 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere will be below the probe at this height).

The launch, weather permitting, is scheduled to take place Saturday May 21, from one of several predetermined launch sites on the Central Coast of California.  Over the next couple weeks I will continue posting information here on Maaia.com, including a complete project report and instructions to teachers and other individuals who wish to replicate a similar flight.  For those interested in tracking the progress of the flight, we are using the amateur radio Amateur Packet Reporting System (APRS) to track AAHAB-1 using amateur radio call sign K6LCM-11.  The onboard APRS unit will send frequent position reports to amateur radio stations across the region which will, in turn, map the flight on APRS.fi in real-time.  Click here to follow along on Saturday morning using a Google Maps-based APRS system.

The first media release we sent out about the project from Anacapa School explains some more details about the flight as well.  Stay tuned for more followup information.

Update May 21, 2011: Listen to the public radio story about the launch!

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Mauna Kea, in addition to being the most important spiritual place for native Hawaiians (in ancient law, only kahunas were allowed to visit the peak), is also home to 13 deep-space telescopes from highly-acclaimed research institutions around the country, including the University of Hawaii. While I did not have my tripod with me at the summit, I was able to capture a few decent shots just before the sun went down.  This image of the Canada-France-Hawaii (left) and the Gemini North (right) observatories is my favorite.

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I had originally configured this client to send images every 90 seconds to Wunderground.  This would work for 2-3 hours and then quit, giving me an error that it could no longer connect to the server.  Only restarting the camera would allow it to reconnect.  I thought that there might be something wrong with my aging LAN router so I replaced that.  No dice!  After exchanging the camera for a new one I am still experiencing the problem.  One thing that has me suspicious is that the DCS-920′s FTP client doesn’t seem to have a problem with any other FTP server except webcam.wunderground.com.  I have no problem uploading images for days without interruption to my own FreeBSD-based maaia.com server.

If anyone out there in Blogland has any suggestions, I am open to them.  Right now I have reduced the number of image uploads to once every 360 seconds.  Maybe I was overloading the system (shot in the dark).

Updates to follow …

UPDATE November 5, 2010: While the DCS-920′s internal FTP client seems to be unreliable when set to the Weather Underground FTP server, the FTP client built into the software package EvoCam 3.6.9 ($30) is able to maintain a reliable image upload schedule.  After two weeks of using the wireless DCS-920 with EvoCam I have had good results.  EvoCam gives you many additional options including the ability to save time-lapse movies, add time and date stamps as well as record video when motion is detected.  View live video from my camera at the K6LCM weather page.

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The K6LCM weather station and webcam uses a simple image capture system called iCam to recognize motion in the frame and capture it.  Designed for home security, iCam alerts my iPhone of the activity via push notification and saves the image frames in question (presumably in the hopes of catching a robber red-handed).  In my case, the result for the past week has been an interesting collection of images of birds and bugs flying across the weather webcam’s  field of view.  Today, however, the convective activity over the mountains put on a show this evening and iCam snatched a few cool shots the moment the lightning struck.

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A Minotaur IV booster carrying a military space surveillance satellite lifted off from Vandenberg AFB this evening from South Base at 9:41 p.m. PDT.  A first-of-its-kind military tool to monitor satellites and space junk is aboard the rocket. According to the U.S. Air Force, the device will help keep better tabs on the more than half a million pieces of space junk that pose a potential hazard to operational satellites and manned spacecraft.

These photos were taken with a Canon 50D from Santa Barbara’s Westside.  Both exposures were more than 10 seconds long.

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Live view from the Santa Barbara webcam

After several months of mental planning I finally set up a companion weather webcam for my personal weather station. Over the summer I ran a few tests with a cheap USB webcam pointed out the front window, but the view of the yard proved to be rather uninteresting. What I really wanted to do was to capture the mountain-view I noticed from the roof while setting up the weather instruments. This view is not available from any interior portions of the house so I set out to design an outdoor wireless camera system for less than $100.

There are several options for outdoor cameras online. A simple Amazon.com search revealed many choices, but all of the all-weather WiFi units fell outside of the budget that I had restricted myself to. My requirements were that the camera and weatherproof housing be under $100. Given that the unit was to be mounted on the garage and the computer and wired Internet connections are in the main house I was also limited to a WiFi solution.  I decided on the D-Link DCS920 Wireless-G Internet Camera, as it is a free-standing unit that can actually handle the scheduled capture and uploading of the images without the help of a computer. Many retailers have the DCS920 in the $80-$90 range.

The DCS920 is not an outdoor camera so I needed an enclosure that would both keep rain out and allow the camera lens to poke through.  Camera in hand, I set off to Home Depot where a helpful employee knew right away what to use to keep it dry.  He directed me to the electrical department and the Cantex Inc. 6 X 6 X 4 Junction Box.  I was able to drill the necessary holes to mount the camera, make the power connection, and allow the lens to see the light of day.  An additional make-shift clear plastic covering lets the lens see out, without letting water in.  Home Depot also stocks a extension cord which was a near-match for the beige house color and made a less conspicuous power source than a traditional orange extension cord.  The camera’s power adapter fit nicely inside the Cantex box alongside the camera, concealing the electrical connection from the rain as well.

The DCS920 has a Web interface that can be setup via Ethernet beforehand in order to enable the wireless connection to a secure 802.11g network.  The interface is very basic, and does not readily allow one to keep local archives of images easily (there is an option to email a photo as well as upload it to one FTP server).  Aftermarket software is available that allows for greater flexibility over nearly any webcam including the ability to add on-screen captions and time stamps, however I have opted to keep it simple for now.

After plugging in the settings for my Wunderground.com account my weather camera was up and running with a view of the Santa Ynez Mountain range above Santa Barbara.  You will find time-lapse videos of the images gathered in the Wunderground archive.

Update October 2, 2010: It should be noted that the D-Link manual notes the following environmental specifications:

• Operating temperature: 0°C to 40°C (32°F to 104°F)
• Storage temperature: -20°C to 70°C (-4°F to 158°F)
• Operating relative humidity: 20% to 80% non-condensing

Update November 5, 2010: The DCS-920′s internal FTP client seems to be unreliable when set to the Weather Underground FTP server, however the FTP client built into the software package EvoCam 3.6.9 ($30) is able to maintain a reliable image upload schedule. After two weeks of using the wireless DCS-920 with EvoCam I have had good results. EvoCam gives you many additional options including the ability to save time-lapse movies, add time and date stamps as well as record video when motion is detected. View live video from my camera at the K6LCM weather page.

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