People really love sticking GoPros all over the place, don't they?
There are quite a few folks who've developed a hobby of dropping them into the sea and showing people what aquatic creatures lurk beneath the waves.
Possibly the worst use of a GoPro I've ever witnessed was at a football game where the bloke in front of me was holding it in one hand to record the game while his other hand clutched his phone filming the same thing.
He'd alternate them depending on how tired his arms were, resulting in two terrible recording attempts while keeping the ways he was blocking my view fresh.
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That might be the worst way I've ever seen someone use a GoPro, but sending one of the little cameras as close to space as a balloon could carry it might just be one of the best.
YouTuber BloonStu used a balloon to float a GoPro up as high as it'd go until it got a damn good view of space.
Launching his balloon from Texas, the GoPro floated up above the clouds until they were naught but tiny features drifting below.
Up and up the GoPro flew until the camera stopped seeing the ground and started seeing the Earth.
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The camera could capture the curvature of the planet as it looked down at one tiny aspect of this massive ball that we all live on, except perhaps for those astronauts who are stuck in space for the foreseeable future.
The balloon with a GoPro rose ever higher until the inevitable happened, it burst.
What had seconds earlier been soaring above the world was now tumbling back down to the ground, and even though a parachute was deployed the air pressure and density this close to space was so thin that it had little impact.
Fortunately the parachute became of more use the closer to the ground the GoPro got, and the camera came down to land in a field.
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The YouTuber was able to follow a tracking device and locate his gizmo.
He did note that he followed all Federal Aviation Administration regulations and notified the Flight Standards District Office of his launch beforehand.
The man added: "A NOTAM [Notice to Air Missions] was even filed with Ft Worth center for balloon activity."
As for why he did this, he explained in his video: "Mostly, I had free time and needed a project/hobby to keep me engaged and secondly, space is neat."
Space is indeed neat, and if you have a balloon that can fly a camera close to it and have a good look before bursting (which handily returns the camera to you) then what's stopping you?
Topics: Space, Science, Technology, Weird
Joe Harker