Daily Archives: 1/24/2008

Awesome High Altitude Balloon Flight

Well, the price of launching a satellite for real is still way too high to be even an insane possibility, but there are some fun things that a space minded individual or club can do: notably, high altitude balloon launches. Witness this one, which came across the Make Blog today. It includes some pretty nifty high altitude video from the edge of space.

Flight 2 – High ALtitude Object



MVI_0466 from natrium42 on Vimeo.

Globe trotting, er… plotting…

My old program for drawing globes made some nice postscript output, but in reexamining the source code, I can only imagine that I was doped up on cough medicine while working on it. I started a bit on a revamp of it, starting by purloining the matrix and vector library that I used in my old raytracer and swiping the outline data from xearth. A couple of hours of TV watching and coding later, and I have the basics fleshed out:

First attempt at the globe…

I’m not 100% satisfied with it, since the coordinate system that it currently uses is the default one that xearth uses, and which is not the same as used by the internals of the plan13 code that I will eventually interface to it. It’s not
especially critical, but I think it makes a less clear presentation. I’ll tighten it up later.

It also doesn’t do any filling of the continent outlines, which I’m not really sure is a flaw: my goal is not to present a photorealistic view of the earth, but rather to show a clear schematic of the path of satellites as they orbit the earth. Still, I’ll give it some thought.