This is awesome. Taking Photos from Space....for under $150

So this might seem boring to some, but to us, it is just downright cool.



A group of MIT students (who else) were able to successfully launch a camera into the stratosphere, have it snap photos of our blue little planet, and then land safely back on the ground, where they retrieved the footage...all for under $150.

For starters, they used a Canon A470 camera with an 8GB SD card, which they bought used on Amazon. To track the balloon, they bought a prepaid Motorola i290 GPS cell phone to receive location text messages. To keep the entire camera and cell phone from not freezing (as temperatures can get below 60 degrees), they simply put the gadgets in a styrofoam beer cooler, and put a few of those camping instant hand warmers in there.



The entire weight came in at around 2 lbs, and they found the camera about 20 miles away from the launch site, about 5 hours later.

Now, we need to take this to the next step here at 8112, and do this but with video. Too bad we don't have degrees from MIT.

For the full details on how they did it
Check out their site