2nd Weather Balloon (from 2010)

Back in 2010 I was part of a team that sent up a couple of weather balloons on a NC spacegrant. I posted about the first one (which flew straight into a thunderstorm) a long time ago, but with the recent weather balloons in the news, I decided to go back and look up my old photos from the second balloon.  In the pic above the yellow balloon was the first one, the green plot is of this second balloon.

We launched from Monroe Airport in NC and the path of the balloon followed the path of HWY 74, which is the main road in the area. There are a couple of good pics of Wadesboro, NC and Lake Tillery as well.

This one went about 75k ft. in elevation. You can *just* make out the curvature of the earth in some of the photos. We launched on a beautiful clear day and we were able to visually track the balloon’s full ascent AND descent. Fun times! Luckily it didn’t freeze on the ascent so we got some better pics. We stocked this one with a bunch of candy like last time and it was fun eating space candy again!

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