The homemade Canon space camera

Two MIT students in the U.S. have crafted a space camera costing less than $150 (that’s around £90!). Putting together the low budget rig from a weather balloon, helium, a Styrofoam beer cooler and of course a cheap compact camera the 2 clever chaps were able to photograph the earth from around 93,000 feet (which I’m led to believe is not *quite* space – but it’s still pretty high in my book…)

Thinking of everything in their ingenious plans for the flight, named Project Icarus, Justin Lee and Oliver Yeh were able to locate the camera once it had returned to earth by placing a GPS enabled mobile phone inside the box that could be tracked.

The camera’s flight lasted five hours, and the camera on board, a Canon A470, had been hacked to shoot a picture every five seconds. An 8GB memory card proved big enough to last the duration of the flight, giving the pair thousands of images to choose from upon its return.

A bunch of mathematical jiggery pokery went into the calculations needed to check the trajectory and landing site, but the point of this experiment is, at such a cheap price, anyone could have a go at this (although the Project Icarus website is pretty keen to point out that launching things in to the stratosphere can be dangerous – so be careful kids.)

It’s also got me wondering what other geeky science stuff has been happening in the camerasphere? Have you engineered your compact (or even your SLR if you’re brave enough to risk it) to do something amazing? If you have, or know of anyone who has, please do send me the links or pictures – my inner geek loves all this stuff – drop me an email, comment on this blog below or discuss in the forums if you’ve found something cool!

Meanwhile, check out the Project Icarus homepage for more pictures from just about every step of the project, including pre-flight, flight and landing photos, along with detailed instructions on how the project was carried out so you can try your own luck.

Image: Earth from 93,000 feet by Justin Lee and Oliver Yeh/1337arts