schoolteacher's balloon photographs edge of the earth

While surfing the net two years ago, the 41-year-old Albertan came across some visually stunning photographs of the Earth from way, way up that a man from California had captured in the 1990s, all with a big balloon and a "regular old" camera.

Mr. Rafaat's imagination soared.

...

Using a Kaysam weather balloon (bought as part of six-pack from New Jersey), a used Nikon Coolpix P2 digital camera purchased off eBay, and a global positioning system tracking device, Mr. Rafaat and two of his balloon-enthusiast friends, Barry Sloan and James Ewen, released SABLE-3 (Southern Alberta Balloon Launch Experiment) at 9:31 a.m. on Aug. 11. The camera - set to take photos at one-minute intervals - and the GPS were put into a Styrofoam box. That payload, built by Mr. Rafaat's Grade 7 science class, was affixed to a parachute, the parachute to the helium-filled balloon.

Globe and Mail - A view from the stratosphere - September 5, 2007

SABLE-3 (Note: site is slow)

For electronics they're using a Byonics Micro-Trak 300 transmitter (it's not a data logger).  Presumably attached to one of the Byonics GPS modules.  UPDATE 2007-11-10: In the comments they indicate the GPS is from SparkFun.

Comments

[James Ewen]

The GPS was purchased from Sparkfun, the units that Byon sells are far too heavy for use on the balloon payload. You can look at the tracker equipment we used on the BEAR portion of the website. I believe Barry is still working on the detailed information pages about the electronics onboard. We pestered him to get the photos up, since the locals wanted to see the fruits of our labours. Things have been slowed down by all the media attention. We had lots of help from other local ham radio operators for the tracking and recovery aspect of the project. Brian VE6JBJ is a school teacher from Airdrie, who last year had his school take part in the ARISS program, where his kids talked directly to the space station. Next year he is sending up a balloon payload similar to SABLE-3 with his school kids. Our next project if BEAR-3, a high altitude record attempt. We are looking to push past 120,500 feet. This requires extremely light weight payloads, and slow ascent rates to get extra altitude. Live video feeds, and autonomous return vehicles are also on the radar, but time and funds are in scarce supply. Data logging is also an item that we are looking at as well so we can have more data than only 1 report per minute.

James
VE6SRV