HD Video from 100,000 feet…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lie0diOhfdgA group of Canadian amateur radio enthusiasts experimenting with using a balloon as a radio repeater (think very low-earth orbit satellite without active transponders) has posted YouTube video taken onboard the balloon.

The video of the BEAR-4 mission, taken in HD, is visually compelling and suggests a new way to get aerial photographs. The only drawback? At 107,145′, the conditions around the balloon basically constituted a vacuum, at least as long as electronics go. This means that the air pressure was so low that all the camcorder’s buttons were pressed at once. But considering the fact that most camcorders are only rated to operated in elevations up to 25,000′, this is not bad at all.

And, as a tribute to the remarkable capabilities of flash memory-based camcorders, the camcorder recorded almost the entire voyage:

“The balloon and camera were launched at 7:44 AM, the balloon burst at 10:51 AM at 107,145 ft. and the camera landed via parachute at 11:40 AM, 89 miles from the launch site after a 3 hr. & 56 min. flight. The camera recorded a total of 4 hrs. & 22 min. of Hi-Def Video before it stopped recording 53 secs after landing, when its 32GB of memory was full. The only thing better would have been if the camera had recorded for several minutes more to captured the sound of us approaching and video of us opening its container.”