Solar eclipse from the stratosphere in 360

Come with us to the stratosphere to watch the umbra of a total solar eclipse from 24 km up!

This was recorded with a 360 camera (GoPro MAX2) aboard a helium balloon.

The sun was ocluded in totality for viewers on the ground, but the shadow came almost parallel to it, so the sun is still shining on the camera at our altitude. It still looks round because the image is overexposed in those pixels. Our goal was to record the umbra instead, but you can see the ocluded sun from near space in videos by Veritasium, GoPro, and NASA.

Our lenses built up condensation that then froze at minus 50 degrees. Hence the white dots you can see moving around.

Much of the gear and expertise was provided by StratoFlights ( http://stratoflights.com/ ), including GPS trackers and data loggers that were then used to display the data with Telemetry Overlay ( https://goprotelemetryextractor.com/ ).

The balloon was about 2 meters in diameter on the surface. We ascended to about 24 km at the eclipse's totality time and kept on going until the balloon popped close to 39 km (24 mi) high. The balloon was more than 10 meters in diameter when it popped, due to the very thin atmosphere (967 hPa vs 3 hPa).

Thank you to StratoFlights Lu, Ernest, Montse, Arlet, Axel, Abe Kislevitz for all the help!

#telemetryoverlay #umbra #totality #solareclipse #space