CANADA: A team of photographers that have already created a 360 degree film of a space balloon want to film a total solar eclipse at the North Pole on March 20, and need support on indiegogo in order to do it. By March 5, the team had raised €2,876 of their €25,000 goal.
José Urdiales, Annelie Schoenmaker and their team want to travel to the North Pole to film a total solar eclipse from space using cameras with a 360 degree field of vision, mounted on a balloon. A total solar eclipse like this will not take place again for 500,000 years, and it will only be visible from two populated areas: Svalbard and the Faroe Islands. Visibility is expected to be cloudy, but the team won’t have to worry about that if they’re recording from the stratosphere.
The team already knows how to fly the spherical camera at high altitude and create the video. The challenge at the North Pole is recovery – getting the camera back from whatever remote area it has drifted into, possibly needing to brave open water or polar bears along the way. (Svalbard is a popular spot for balloon launches, with a launch base operated by the ISTAR Group and the University of Roma La Sapienza, but hiring a vehicle still costs money.)
They’re asking for €20,000 in order to launch a successful recovery operation, which may require a helicopter or boat. An additional €5,000 would go toward distribution and post-processing of the video.
The 360 degree film is made using six GoPro cameras mounted in a spherical configuration.
The team hopes to use the video as an educational tool, and not just in terms of the view. Ballooning is an environmentally-friendly form of flight, and the team wants to reach people on an emotional level too. The “Overview Effect” reported by some astronauts is a sense of both euphoria and responsibility
This photo from a high-altitude balloon was taken by zero2infinity in 2009. The light balloon is floating at 27 kilometers high. Image credit: zero2infinity This photo from a high-altitude balloon was taken by zero2infinity in 2009. The light balloon is floating at 27 kilometers high.
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