Space Club Toronto

On October 10th, 2024, there were forecasts of amazing aurora (northern lights) for huge swathes of Canada and even well down into the USA. A couple of space club members did late-evening trip to Richardson’s Lookout Conservation Area, which is just over an hour from downtown Toronto. So, it’s not super dark (too close to the city for that), but it’s quick to get to.

And indeed, the skies did not disappoint! Before you look at these images, just fair warning – as awesome as they are, they do NOT do the actual aurora any justice! It was the entire sky, it was super bright, and it was slowly changing in a way that was hard to observe, but beautiful, and transformative over time. You’d stare at a bit of it, then look somewhere else, and when you looked back, it’d be all different and even more beautiful!

Check out this amazing gallery of photos that we took! Images on top by Eric, using an iPhone 12 Mini, images on bottom by Pavel, using a Samsung Galaxy S10e (SM-G970W). This kind of thing, the images often look little like what you see with the naked eye – and that’s why it’s so interesting to compare across two different cameras like this. In my opinion, the Android images do better at conveying how BRIGHT in the sky the aurora was (it really stood out against both the trees and the darker sky; the sky is kinda washed out in the iPhone images, and that’s not correct), while the COLOURS come through better in the iPhone shots (it really was red and greens, unlike the sort of orange that you see in the Samsung photos). But both miss the sheer scale of the thing, obviously – these are just small pieces of the sky, the Aurora was everywhere! Also, click each image to see larger version!

Anyway, we’re getting close to the peak of the solar cycle now, so there is a decent chance that there will be another opportunity to see something like this in the northern hemisphere over the next year or two. If so, I strongly recommend you go see it, absolutely incredible! Not to be missed!

For the Total Solar Eclipse on April 8th, 2024, Space Club did a road trip to Québec! Originally we planned to go to somewhere near Columbus, Ohio, and see the Air Force Museum near Dayton, but 4 days out, the forecast was showing clouds there, so we rapidly rebooked and ended up in a hotel in Sherbrooke, Québec. From there it was just over an hour scenic drive to a beach near Lac-Mégantic. Here’s an awesome video in three parts:

The first section is a time-lapse showing the exciting run-up to the darkness of totality, with us screaming :-). The second bit shows the shadow bands, which is some waviness in the light which occurs immediately before totality, and looks really neat. The final section gives you a view of the 360deg bizarre twilight, and a look through the telescope at the sun during totality.

Here’s a gallery of photos of the eclipse:

The Space Club Meetup group also had an Eclipse Event, which allowed many other groups of people to find each other and plan their own trips; we were happy to be able to facilitate this for people, and over 100 new members joined the group!

The next Total Solar Eclipse which is reasonable to go see will be on August 2nd, 2027, best locations across the top of Africa. Or, there is another on July 22, 2028, best locations in Australia.

This post is super late, but we had a successful launch and payload recovery in Sept 2019! We launched from the grounds of a public school NW of Waterloo, and landed in wine country, SE of Hamilton, a journey of ~120km, it was in the air for almost exactly 2 hours. We reached a maximum altitude of 88,405 ft (26,946m).

Our knock-off GoPro camera worked great, we have 2h of 4k video of the entire journey up and down. Launch Video (2min). Landing video (2min). And, the most spectacular video: burst video, from the maximum height:

Here’s some awesome photos of our setup and launch:

Download our Full GPS data. You’ll need Google Earth to visualize that (it’s XML data).

Also, thanks to Jen for the last-minute rescue of “oh shit Eric forgot the balloon, we have to turn back and cancel, sorry everyone”. Officially this was the Jen Balloon Launch, she’s the title sponsor :-).

For the first time ever we put ALL of the electronics (radios, cameras, battery, etc) into the payload container and turned it on. Idea was to test installation and startup procedures, and then see how long it lasts on our 5 Ah USB battery. Ideally we get 3+ hours, more is better obviously. In previous tests (with MORE hardware) we got that, but good to check now that we have final hardware inside. Here’s some shots of the payload in foam container:

Test results: our battery life is awesome! We got 6 hours and 2 minutes of uptime. We also learned a lot of things, like needing to adjust the voltage setting below which the GPS cuts out, how to properly shut off the RaPi wifi, and that we probably do have enough insulation (even in the -5C fridge freezer, the temperature of the electronics only dropped to 19C – so at -60C, we’ll probably be a bit below freezing, but that should still be fine). Even the knock-off gopro functioned really well – storage did not fill up as fast as expected since most of the video was dark and/or static, which actually probably means battery life will be even better – we know the camera shuts off once the storage is full, and that should theoretically be around the 3h point (well after landing) based on previous tests.

We packed up our supplies and headed out to Phyllis Rawlinson Park on July 27th to test some of our ideas for how to inflate a balloon, how to measure the lift, how to attach the payload, etc. We learned a LOT and also had a critical failure with our GPS antenna that we’re glad to have done on a test rather than potentially at the real launch, where it would have caused a scrub! We did let several balloons head up (with dummy payloads only), our calculations said that they would pop at ~5000 ft, but that will still higher than we could actually see with the naked eye. Next time let’s bring binoculars! This was so much fun and really has us excited for the actual launch and payload chase.

To infinity and beyond!  Time to get this rocket ship doing some hop tests! Specifically, time to start blogging about our High Altitude Balloon launch 🙂