Aerial Photography

Ever since I learned that model rockets could carry cameras, I knew that I had to have one. After I started into model rocketry, I tried (and failed) a few times to save up enough money to buy the Astrocam 110, Estes' camera rocket kit. It wasn't until Christmas of 1999 that I finally got my hands on a real Astrocam 110 rocket. My account of the construction and testing of that kit can be found in a separate article. I launched Astrocam 110 twice on the same day, October 28, 2001. I launched the Astrocam 110 atop my Lone Star rocket, although I didn't properly prep the camera for flight, and a frame was not exposed for that flight. I attempted to fly Astrocam 110 in the fall of 2003, but I found that its shutter was jammed shut. I still haven't determined how to fix that problem.

But, I was ready to develop the film, and see how the pictures looked, which I had taken two years earlier. Since 110 is cartridge film, I simply popped the cartridge into a different camera (a quality Minolta SLR), and finished up the roll taking pictures of my LEGOs, and a wildfire. That's impossible with roll film. When I finished the cartridge, I had my mom take it in to be developed, and I awaited the outcome.

When I got the pictures back, I found a bunch of grainy pictures of people taken at the launch site between flights, some shots of the sky, the windows of my house, and the pictures I had taken with the SLR camera. But, I didn't see any sign of the aerial shots.

However, I remembered that I had documented the frame number which had been exposed on the flight. They were frames three and seven. I held the negatives up to the light, and I could very vaguely see an outline of houses and a cul-de-sac. I held in my hands film exposed automatically, hundreds of feet in the air!

The shot was horribly under-exposed, and it was for that reason that I didn't receive a print from the laboratory of that shot. I wasn't really sure what to do, but I decided to try scanning the negatives with an ordinary USB scanner. That didn't work, since the negatives weren't backlit. I tried placing a mirror behind the negatives, but that also didn't work. I wasn't sure what to do.

But I decided to ask my Film Class teacher, who also is the eccentric and witty Photography teacher, Mr. Russell Croop. He said that he had an attachment for a digital camera (not a scanner) for photographing slides. He reasoned that it might work for negatives as well. It did.

It took about twenty minutes to clean the negatives, put them in the digital camera's attachment, and take a picture of the negative's image. When this was done, Mr. Croop enhanced the image in Photoshop, to bring out the details and colors a little better. But, there still wasn't very much from the beginning.

I have one of the pictures online, which I have identified as the north branch of Bosque Court. (Fans of The Voyages of the Galactic will recognize that name as the planet on which the Galactic crashes, in Chapter 3.) I identified it based on a satellite photograph shot on October 4, 1999 (about two years before the picture was taken). The righthand side of the picture shows the park from whence I launch my rockets, the WAEC Space Harbor. The streets are also visible in a cheap MapQuest map. Note that the street curves the wrong way in my photograph; it's flipped because of the mirror on the side of Astrocam 110, which allows it to look up instead of outward. But, my photograph has higher resolution than Terrarserver's collection.

When I had identified the street, I amused myself by finding cool things in the space photographs library. My high school is really easy to see from space, but I've never flown a camera rocket near it. My elementary school isn't as easy to see, but it's still there. I was probably there when this picture was taken, four years ago. My church looks insignificant from space (it's the bright building a little below the center of the picture). The public library looks fairly different from space than it does on the ground. The art deco Courthouse, now 70 years old, is visible with the pedestrian mall, Pearl Street. I can even see my current house (although I wasn't living there at the time). There's also my old launch site, the WAEC Spaceport. The location where we shot the Earth scenes in the Worst Sci-Fi Prequel Ever!, NCAR, is visible, although it's not as distinctive from above. The location for the Titan scenes (as well as Mount Sinai) is apparent. The Buffs' stadium, Folsom Field, looks rather cool from space. And lastly, there's the NIST building, where the atomic clock keeps time faithfully.

There is more potential to aerial photography from a rocket, since my two grainy photographs are distinctly lackluster. But, I don't think that Astrocam 110 is the answer. It makes no automatic adjustments, and the pictures are rarely properly-exposed or in focus. But, the best cameras with automatic features are SLR "bridge cameras," such as my little Minolta 110 SLR. But do I really want to modify it to fly atop a rocket, knowing fully well that I might never see it again? Probably not. There is the possibility of launching the Minolta on a balloon, but I don't think I'll do that either. But as it is, I have completed the WAEC objective, and I might as well move on to other things.