Ok, this was a wild ride this morning. After taking a few shots with the Canon and telephoto (where I forgot to zoom out!), I ran up to the observatory and attempted to point the new scope at the balloon. Mind you I have not actually taking a photo with it yet and had not completed hooking everything up. There were wires hanging down as I tried to keep the rapidly moving balloon in the field of view. I started recording a movie as I tracked it manually with the mount’s keypad. I managed to get over 5 gigabytes of videos of which about 30 seconds had a barely usable image. I won’t go into all the geeky details of processing movies of planets, but I used that work flow and got this. You can sort of make out the payload and solar panels hanging below the envelope of the balloon. The balloon is reportedly about 50 feet tall, the payload weighs about 1,000 lbs. and it was at least 60,000 feet up.
