- Photo courtesy Jonathan Woodbury
Jonathan Woodbury, who will be a high school senior next year, knows what Arizona’s horizon looks like, from over 100,000 feet, and has the photographs to prove it. What started out as a father-and-son hobby of high-altitude ballooning has turned into a precise scientific endeavor.
“I had seen a couple news stories about high-altitude ballooning and was fascinated by it,” Woodbury said. “One of the first things we (he and his father) did was think about our goals and plan out what our strategy was.”
Their first launch was a successful flight in Gila Bend. Woodbury said each launch was taken from a different location near Maricopa, catching pictures of the Phoenix area and near-space.
“Most of our launches have focused on photography and GPS tracking and recovery,” he said.
Woodbury said he extended his camera’s operating system to adjust the focus, flash and timing in order to get a variety of high-quality photos.
The balloon is filled with helium, with a suspended parachute, camera and tracking devices. Woodbury said it’s vital to make subtle adjustments to make sure each launch flies in accordance with their predictions.
“We spend quite a bit of time running flight predictions ahead of time to ensure that we will have an acceptable flight,” he said. “We can affect the actual flight-path by varying the amount of helium that we use.”
With projects like these comes a variety of hoops to jump through in order to launch safely, Woodbury said.
“The FAA has a set of regulations called FAR-101, which deal with the size and weight restrictions of the payload carrier,” he said. “Our payload is small and light enough to be exempt from these regulations, but we strive to follow them anyway, and communicate with the FAA for each of our launches.”
Woodbury and his father are not the only Arizonans with this unique hobby. The Arizona Near Space Research group coordinates monthly launches and provides a network of supporters of science, technology, education and mathematics.
Woodbury fits right in with the group members. He plans on going to a university for electrical engineering, and currently tutors math and science at Chandler Gilbert Community College, he said.
Woodbury hopes to continue his high-altitude ballooning hobby he started with this father, getting more and more pictures of near-space over Arizona skies.
