A 22-year old from the UK has managed to take amazing photos of the edge of space by floating a £30 camera into the atmosphere using a large helium balloon. That’s right, Adam Cudworth created a home-made device consisting of a box with a GPS, radio and microprocessor. After spending 40-hours building it, the box was attached to a balloon and lifted to an incredible height of 110,210-feet. It took 2.5-hours to fly 20-miles up into the atmosphere, before snapping impressive views of Earth from space. A GPS tracker was used to track the device’s ascension and an attached radio transmitter alerted its location. Continue reading for another video and more information.
“It’s just a bit of hobby really, I just wanted to set myself a challenge – but I’m amazed at the results. I saw a guy who did a similar thing a couple of years back and I just wanted to recreate them – but better. I have no background in astrophysics or anything like that, I’m just an engineering student. People think its something that costs millions of pounds but I’ve proved you can do it on just a £200 budget. When I retrieved the camera I was stunned – it had captured some incredible photos and footage. The exposure settings were different to my previous two attempts and I used materials which would be more robust in extreme temperatures and this led to clearer photos at altitude. The on-board video camera recorded great footage close to the ground after launch, however the lens fogged up at about 3km in altitude because moisture got in the lens – but it still looked rather impressive,” said Adam.
