Hobbyist Spanks NASA

I got a couple of google alerts with titles like "hobbyist's photos confound NASA," and ignored them, until my curiosity got the best of me. Now I'm wondering if Obama should give our tax dollars earmarked for the space program to guys like this. I'm not serious about that, but this does make you wonder about how we could be doing things a little less expensively, with a little more out of the box thinking.

Some of the details about this guy who figured out a way to take what looks like satellite photos with a balloon, a point and shoot camera, a parachute and a GPS device, all launched from basically his back yard:

Robert Harrison rigged a Cannon camera to a helium balloon to take photos from the edge of space - images that NASA admits would have cost the space agency tens of millions of dollars to capture.

The whole project cost Harrison about $765.

“A guy phoned up who worked for NASA who was interested in how we took the pictures,” Harrison told The Times U.K. “He wanted to know how the hell we did it. He thought we used a rocket. They said it would have cost them millions of dollars.”

The Icarus Project, as Harrison has dubbed his ongoing experiments, features a point-and-shoot camera, a parachute and a GPS system all attached to a balloon. The balloon ascends up to 35 km before it pops, sending the camera floating gently back to the ground below. The GPS allows Harrison to track it to where it lands.

From his home computer, the GPS also allows him to track the camera's progress as it climbs towards space – snapping photos every five minutes before switching off to sleep.

The camera is wrapped in insulation so it continues to function in the frigid -60 C temperatures high in the Earth’s atmosphere.

His photos can be found here. I'm trying to find a link of NASA images of earth, but the main site they seem to be on has a complicated search engine. Try this. Not sure it has the most current photos, but I guess it will do.