Launch II

So the first launch was an utter failure of sorts. Learn from your mistakes I suppose. We retrieved the balloon after quite a lot of pulling and weaving the tangled nylon wire.

I thought to myself, we could just try this again anyway, everything was still working and the helium surely couldnt leak out of a balloon overnight?

Wrong! About one quarter of the helium had dissappeared by the morning after. It couldnt even carry the camera payload without the box!

Damn. But we decided to fly the balloon without a payload just to see how high it would have gone anyway.

This time it was a (relatively) clear day with no winds about and so it was liftoff time!

Here is a picture of the balloon about 40m up.

And at 120m. How exciting! If only we had a payload attached...

Apologies for the poor picture quality. I have to make the pictures small so the page loads reasonably quick. You'll have to trust me that there is actually a red dot of a balloon somewhere there. This is at 160m AGL.

The balloon continued to rise quickly despite the increasingly heavy weight of the nylon string it had to bear.

This is a shot at around 240m AGL.

Jeez, barely visible now.

Camera zoom is always the same, and I always included that palm tree frond to have a sense of scale.

Those clouds sure do look menacing, but still there wasn't much wind about. And definately no sign of rain, which was good.

This was the highest altitude, at 360m AGL, before we took it down due to it being illegal (that's anything above 100m AGL).

Lucky no planes were about.

See our final launch at Launch III.