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Students capture photos and environmental data from 90,000 feet above Earth’s surface
AAHAB-1 reached an altitude greater than 90,000 feet overlooking the Central Coast, San Luis Obispo Bay and the Pismo Dunes.
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.
Posted May 25, 2011 at 17:37. Add a comment
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)
Posted May 19, 2011 at 19:22. 1 comment
T-minus four days, nine hours until lift off of AAHAB-1, Anacapa School’s first near space probe! What is a near space probe? Never mind that … what is “near space?”
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!
Posted May 17, 2011 at 00:22. 1 comment
One evening in Hawaii, we decided to journey up to the top of Mauna Kea, the highest point in Hawaii. Standing at the top nearly 14,000 feet in elevation above sea level and above 40% of the Earth’s atmosphere, left me short of breath but not short on views. The vista from the top looking over the persistent cloud deck made for a storybook sunset. And the lack of atmosphere above coupled with the remoteness of the location (2,400 miles from the U.S. mainland) revealed stars that would make even countryfolk blush.
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.
Posted April 10, 2011 at 20:27. Add a comment
Daniela and I flew around Hawaii’s Big Island in a Cessna 172S yesterday and were lucky enough to have just enough cloud clearance to sneak into the rift zone for some photos of Kilauea’s active Puʻu ʻŌʻō volcanic vent in Volcano National Park. Check out the gallery for more shots taken by us during the two-and-a-half hour flight counterclockwise around the island.
Posted March 28, 2011 at 13:13. Add a comment
You might have noticed that the K6LCM Weather Camera has been offline quite a bit recently. I have been having some difficulty keeping a connection to the Wunderground FTP webcam server with the DCS-920 WiFi camera. Out of the box, the camera has an FTP client that can be configured to automatically send still images periodically to an FTP server.
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.
Posted October 16, 2010 at 15:31. 2 comments
The new weather webcam has been up and running for less than a week and it has already captured some interesting phenomenon. On the heels of a record-breaking heat wave, a stationary low pressure system hanging over northern Mexico has been steering subtropical moisture into Southern California. This moist and unstable airmass is a perfect incubator for thunder storms which have popped up in SoCal over the past day and remain in the forecast through Sunday.
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.
Posted September 30, 2010 at 23:58. Add a comment
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.
Posted September 25, 2010 at 22:05. 1 comment
A couple weeks back I saw a flier in a local shop advertising a day trip on a vintage railway car. The classic 39 seat first class lounge was built in 1949 by the famous Pullman Standard Car Manufacturing Company for use on the old San Francisco Overland Trail line between Chicago and San Francisco on the now defunct passenger service of Southern Pacific Railroad.
We arrived at Santa Barbara’s Amtrak station on Sunday morning as the San Luis Obispo-bound Amtrak train pulled in the station. The familiar sight of Amtrak’s polished steel train was interrupted by what I would soon learn was the trademark “Daylight” paint scheme of the old Southern Pacific line. Our Pullman car dropped off a trainload of Los Angeles day-trippers bound for Santa Barbara’s urban wine trail – a prearranged combination train ride and wine tour – and we boarded the classically luxurious streamliner.
Our scenic trip on Southern Pacific railcar 2981 took us through the rarely seen Santa Barbara County coastline, obscured by private ranches, rugged terrain and the implicit secrecy of Vandenberg Air Force Base. As photo opportunities whizzed by the large, crystal-clear windows, I tried my best to snap my shutter. The train’s antique windows had an odd effect on the digital exposures, giving each shot a sort of vintage look and coloring. All of the photos in the gallery were taken on Sunday August 29, 2010, but have a strange quality that, at a glance, might be mistaken for August 29, 1950.
The tracks wind past the infamous Point Conception and Point Arguello where the mostly southern facing coastline of Santa Barbara jogs northward toward the notoriously sharky and perilous waters of the California Central Coast. Past Vandenberg the missile launch sites are clearly visible on the leeward side of the tracks, as is the gigantic 15,000-foot long runway on the base.
While the Santa Barbara to San Luis Obispo trip is relatively new, the Overland Trail car was purchased 23 years ago by Bill Hatrick and his wife Debbie. They restored the train to its original splendor, complete with stewardess’s quarters and a on-board barber shop. The Hatricks claim that they are just one year away from being the car’s longest-term owners, as their records indicate that Southern Pacific itself owned the 2981 railcar for 24 years. Bill serves as conductor and host for the rides. He beamed with pride as he explained the process of restoring the classic railcars to Amtrak’s modern specifications, complete with sanitary holding tanks, rendering quaint the original posted lavatory warnings about not flushing while the train is standing in the station.
When not gliding up the coast hitched to an Amtrak locomotive, the Overland Trail sleeps in Los Angeles Union Station where it is available for charter for a variety of occasions. The Hatrick’s 2981 railcar was even featured in Clint Eastwood’s “Flags of our Fathers,” among other productions.
Visit the complete photo gallery for more images of our journey up the coast, including photos of the launch facilities at Vandenberg. More information and a complete history on the Overland Trail Club Lounge Car can be found at larail.com. For booking information on the Santa Barbra to San Luis Obispo route call Terry at 805.680.0397.
Posted August 31, 2010 at 00:34. 1 comment
According to the Santa Barbara Independent a brushfire has broken out off Old San Marcos Road north of Cathedral Oaks Road. The fire was estimated at three to 3.5 acres as of 4:05 p.m. As of 5:30 p.m. the fire appears to be under control. I was driving on US-101 from Goleta toward Downtown when I saw the smoke and managed to turn off to snap a few photos. More shots are available in the gallery.
Posted August 20, 2010 at 17:50. 1 comment
