Weather Balloon Photography
Discussion
I have a write-up in this week's Amateur Photographer
Edited by daveake on Tuesday 21st October 12:50
Next week I'm launching what will be my 50'th flight (doesn't time fly?). It's a special one as it's a BBC commission to photograph the eclipse from 30km or so.
The launch site isn't, sadly, the Faroes (where the eclipse will be total) but Leicester Racecourse (which gets a bit less than 90% coverage of the sun by the moon). That site was chosen as the BBC have a "live event" there from 9am to 3pm, and again from 6pm to 9pm. Entry is free. There are some details of the event here.
As well as providing entertainment for visitors, the event will also be used for some brief TV segments. The balloon launch will be filmed and some of that shown in the morning Stargazing show on BBC1 from 9am to 10am. The flight will have 4 video cameras and 3 live cameras sending pictures down to the ground. During the live show they'll switch to me once or twice to see what the live pictures are like. The peak eclipse (for Leicester anyway) is about 9:30am so I expect that one of the segments will be after that.
A chase team will go out to recover the flight, and if they're successful then some of the video will be shown during the evening show on BBC2 from 9pm to 10pm.
The reason for so many cameras is to get different views, with and without solar film filters. One video camera and one live camera will use filters; the rest won't. Also, one video camera will point up to record the balloon burst, and another down to look directly at the ground.
We don't have anything to keep the cameras pointed at the sun, so we can't use long lenses, so the sun/moon are going to be pretty small. So we're not expecting wonderful results from the solar-film filtered cameras, but they're worth a try anyway.
Dave
The launch site isn't, sadly, the Faroes (where the eclipse will be total) but Leicester Racecourse (which gets a bit less than 90% coverage of the sun by the moon). That site was chosen as the BBC have a "live event" there from 9am to 3pm, and again from 6pm to 9pm. Entry is free. There are some details of the event here.
As well as providing entertainment for visitors, the event will also be used for some brief TV segments. The balloon launch will be filmed and some of that shown in the morning Stargazing show on BBC1 from 9am to 10am. The flight will have 4 video cameras and 3 live cameras sending pictures down to the ground. During the live show they'll switch to me once or twice to see what the live pictures are like. The peak eclipse (for Leicester anyway) is about 9:30am so I expect that one of the segments will be after that.
A chase team will go out to recover the flight, and if they're successful then some of the video will be shown during the evening show on BBC2 from 9pm to 10pm.
The reason for so many cameras is to get different views, with and without solar film filters. One video camera and one live camera will use filters; the rest won't. Also, one video camera will point up to record the balloon burst, and another down to look directly at the ground.
We don't have anything to keep the cameras pointed at the sun, so we can't use long lenses, so the sun/moon are going to be pretty small. So we're not expecting wonderful results from the solar-film filtered cameras, but they're worth a try anyway.
Dave
Cheers, it was a lot of fun. The live aspect wasn't nearly as intimidating as I feared, mainly because it's rehearsed to death! Had to cut out some things I really wanted to include, due to time constraints, but overall I was happy with the result.
Got loads of video footage, plenty of which is a lot more interesting than what was shown!
Got loads of video footage, plenty of which is a lot more interesting than what was shown!
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