When I was a kid, I used to love to build and launch model rockets. Now my kids are about that age, and we are starting to build and launch rockets together.
Back in the day, there were two commercial "rocket cameras" available--the CamRoc and the AstroCam. I never had one. But today you can find these for under $20, and that includes a roll of film!
Ah, but why would an all-digital photographer want to "go back" to film? Besides, it would be fun to launch a digital rocket camera, but it would also be fun--and very challenging--to build one.
The Rocket Cam project started by browsing through the digital cameras at Wal-Mart. I quickly found one that fit my needs perfectly--it was slender enough to fit into a reasonable rocket, and was cheap--around $17! Sure, it was crap. But it was "disposable". It looks like this:
iConcepts 69152 Web Meeting Dual-Mode USB Webcam Kit
Or, should I say, it *used* to look like this. It was quickly torn apart in may garage so that it could be built into a rocket.
The camera is kind of a pain to set up and use, but I think I've got it down now. I can set it up for low resolution, and get 150+ tiny photos on the internal memory. I can also set it to take "continuous", which means you hold down the shutter release and it takes 2 or 3 pictures a second until it either runs out of memory or you take your finger off the shutter release. And it includes software which lets you load in all of these separate images and combine them into an AVI movie file!
The camera was built into an Estes Icarus. The Icarus was modified with a bigger engine mount so it will accept a D engine (and could be later modified slightly to accept an E engine)--the extra thrust to get the heavy payload higher. The payload area on the Icarus is so huge, I only needed about half of it for this tiny little camera.
I made two small enclosures out of balsa and attached them to opposite sides of the payload section. One has a tiny mirror so that the camera looks straight down along the body. the other one contains a small switch I designed so that the camera starts taking photographs as soon as the rocket leaves the pad.
The only other modification was a larger parachute for the payload section. The Icarus comes down in two parts, carried by separate parachutes. Because the payload section with built-in camera is so heavy, I doubled the size of the parachute.
Between the camera and the rocket kits, I've got about $30 invested in this project. And about 8 hours building it.
I found three cool videos taken by a rocket camera: Jim Malone videos. After wathcing them a few times I did a search on the web for the "Aiptek Pencam Trio" Jim mentions, and found that it's basically the same camera I'm using. It looks like this camera has been manufactured under a variety of names.
Coming soon: a report on the first flight of the Rocket Cam.
[ photograph above: Wisconsin, 2004 ]
