Balloons Are Fun

A couple of weeks ago, on a sunny Sunday (oh the irony!) afternoon, I was chilling out at my girlfriends house with a small helium tank and some balloons. Normally, in situations such as these, a group of people often end up speaking in hilariously high pitch squeaky tones until whatever amount of helium is available is exhausted. However, since there were kids around, and inhaling helium really isn't that good for you, we decided to do something else.

That something else was to float the balloons as high as possible into the sky and then bring it back to earth. As a cheap yet relatively strong way to anchor the balloons to us doomed to the ground, we used ribbon and got some impressive height- which led us to think: "What would happen if we put a camera on these balloons."

And so the subject of todays post was born. Using a digital camera I have owned and rarely used for at least four years and some foam from a hot chocolate box (with the addition of duct tape and a ring) I created this:



After some quick research online, I discovered that one litre of helium is equal to one gram of vertical lift. My makeshift camera mount weighed in at about 305g which means we would need about 305 litres of helium to send this baby up. We estimated that around 25 good sized balloons would get us the lift we needed (I'm not sure why I thought a balloon held 12 litres of helium) but upon testing that theory our camera wouldn't budge.

So, we ended up cutting some weight off the base of the camera mount and then doubling our amount of balloons. The end result? A floating success!!

We let it up on a moderately fine day, though there was a bit of wind high up. We had the balloon connected to two spools of ribbon for safety incase we needed to cut one line. in hindsight, I wish we had've gone up as high as possible but unfortunately I chickened out and decided to reel the camera back in after a couple of hundred yards.


Watch the complete journey

Still, it made for an interesting Sunday afternoon and definitely gave my some ideas on how i could improve the experiment on multiple fronts (check back for a much more impressive balloon mount and ascension system in a few months!)