High Power Rocketry: The "Eye in The Sky"

Note: Many big photos here: it may take a while to download this page.

For the uninitiated, High Power Rocketry is a fun and technically challenging
hobby. I've been in it for a few years and have found others in the sport to be
very helpful. The rockets are flown in an FAA controlled launch area, some
going up over 10,000 feet! Some people, including myself, use a lot of electronics
in our rockets to reliably deploy multiple parachutes, take photos, etc.  This page 
shows a few of the photos from my "Eye in the Sky". Enjoy!  NEW: I've added my in-flight rocket video. You can see it from this website.

     Click here to go back to WhatAGreatPlace.com

    Click here to jump down to the In-Rocket Video. WOW

 
The Eye in the Sky

This scratch built 10 pound rocket uses an Olympus Stylus 35mm camera to take 36 airborn photos on each launch.

A few photos of the Bong Recreational launch field in Wisconsin follow here. Stop by my car along the road at the next launch  and look at my photo album! (It's the Green Ford Explorer that still has Firestone tires)

My thanks to the Wisconsin Tripoli for excellent facilities and well run launches. What a great team.

Ken Radtke
mailto:radtke@whatagreatplace.com
Self portrait from more than a mile up. What a ham.

Booster is hanging on 25' of kevlar over the launch area, coming down on a 3' drogue chute at 35fps. Can you find your car in the lot?
Yes, our launch area does look like a runway from the air! This photoof the "runway" at Bong is looking East, taken well along our descent. It's pretty wet out there on this day.
Mile high view of the launch area looking straight down. launch area is at the upper left corner, which is actually South in this photo. How about if we zoom in a little.. .
This is a blow up of the picture above showing people at the pad director's desk in lower corner, as well as the launch officer's desk in upper corner.
Up is west. That's me in the red shirt near the bottom at the far right side of the road. I was looking up and smiling because my dual deployment worked.
Ever wonder why you land in the water so often? Some of my photos make it pretty clear, so to speak.

This is facing  north from above the launch site. Moving upward you see dirt trails, then the Bong access drive (E-W road), then part of that nasty lake, then the Highway bounding the north side of the park, and then the fields and forests that we drift into when we "put one out of the park".

Off this photo, but showing up on many others, there's another lake to west (left) in case you haven't noticed from your landings.
Now here's a puzzle for you. What did we get a photo of in the lower left corner? Whatever it was, it was really there on the ground.

Here's another puzzle. Should we be able to see the curvature of the earth from a mile up in the field of view of a 35mm lens? Could probably figure that out but I'm too lazy.
We're above the clouds on this day. Looking south you see the farmers field directly south of the launch area. Near the center vertically is the farm house.

And now here's another fact maybe you'll relate to. Around that farmers field is an electric fence. It isn't obvious in the photo, nor from the ground.

How do I know about this electric fence? Let's just say that I accidently  imitated the HV fence scene in Jurasic Park. What a jolt. What a surprise. Be careful back there...
Another view of the farmers house and field from a little lower. This is south of the launch site, though the camera is aiming SE. That's Illinois you see in the background, fwiw.
This was an amusing surprise from my maiden voyage photographs. My "Eye in the Sky" is a bit of a voyeur. It took this picture of another rocket descending when the other rocket didn't even know it was being watched - being watched and photographed by another rocket that is.

I have lots more photos than I have website to put them. Stop by and say hi at the next launch.

Ken Radtke

NEW. Here's 4 photos from a series I took in April. I mounted a mirror on the outside of the rocket, to get a view downward during launch.

Here we see the flames within a couple seconds of launch on a J350W. The pad and dense smoke are to the right, the smoke's dark shadow is to the left.

 

 

2nd photo is after burnout. The smoke trail has been left behind. We're coasting upward. The rocket has rolled about 120 degrees as the heavier mirror side rolls downward. The parking lot is now visible on the runway.

 

 

Continuing to coast in the 3rd photo, now nearly horizontal going into the strong winds of that day. We see wisconsin looking Northwest from the launch site.

 

 

In photo 4, We have deployed the 12" drogue chute. You can see the booster and the piston which pushes out the chute. Despite the high winds, because of dual Adept electronic deployment we land this day only a few hundred yards from the pad! The tiny drogue chute drops it down thousands of feet very fast, then the 5' main chute opens at 750 feet altitude. However, once it landed the wind had fun with the large chute on the ground and dragged and tumbled the rocket for another hundred yards until stopped by some "good samaritans" in the field. It held together with only a few scratches.

On other days when it does land out of sight, I have a tiny Adept ham radio xmiter in the rocket and I locate it with a handheld reciever and a yagi antenna.
ROCKBUSTER VIDEO

This homebuilt is 7 foot 2'' and has a video camera with a ham radio microwave transmitter built in. I take videos and beam them down live to a reciever in the car, where I monitor the flight live and also record the video on a portable VHS. It's a real show.

ROCKET FEATURES: 9 pounds, 7'-2", dual redundant electronic deployment of drogue and main chutes, high quality video and transmitter, HAM radio transmitter for tracking if lost.
SEE THE FLIGHT VIDEO:

Here's the video camera and transmitter equipment. To see my first vidio click below. It's 1 minute long, went up just under one mile over Wisconsin, and is quite dramatic! Your computer must be able to view MPEG-1 streaming files. If not, then download the free player first. See commentary below.

Click to load mpeg player

CLick for the Video

 
VIDEO COMMENTARY, second by second. This is a low resolution MPEG-1 file, about 12meg.

0 seconds: smoke starts streaming from the ignitor

2: engine ignition in a big flash. If you single step through the video frames here you will see a 3x3 wood block flying from the launch pad as the explosion pushes it out!

4: engine is burning out. We're moving up above the runway at 500 mph. There's a rotation evidenced in the runway as the rocket has just a very slow spin.

11: the rocket is starting to pitch over and the horizon appearing as we start going toward the horizontal.

13: the drouge chutes (2 chutes each 18" diameter) are deploying, triggered by two redundant accelerometers that each fire gunpowder charges to push out the first chutes. The video will capture about 30 seconds of turmoil now as the rocket drops at a rate of about 50 mph. The reason for the fast decent is to avoid wind drift which would occur if this was a big chute.

40: the accelerometers will again fire, this time at an altitude of 750 feet. Now it pushes out the main chute. It is 5 feet diameter and slows our decent to a safe 10 mph for a low impact landing. We're coming down right over the runway and the launch table!

1:13 we land 50' from the safety inspection table. Landing is perfect with no breakage.

The same day I relaunched this rocket without the video equipment (to cut weight) with an 8 second slow burn engine!!!!!  WOW. WHAT A SPECTACULAR FLIGHT! 8 seconds under power.