AWESOME.

I'm guessing, uh--almost 90 kft again? If launch was at about 8:32 and last packet was at 8:52 at 23 kft, that's just over a kilofoot a minute again, and if burst was at 1:20 by Adrian's timer, that is, balloon-up plus eighty minutes... 1.15 kft/min by that arithmetic, but I don't know what our recorded contest release time was for NSL-1 anymore. ...Tanner, you can tell me what the last known coordinates were--I believe 23 kft is at least roughly correct and 8:52 was the last reported time... (where was it? over Rolesville or so?)

--me

Yup, 70C. Looks like it got hot sitting out in the sun in an insulated box taking pics every 15 secs ;->

I think the numbers are accurate, they seemed to do what I expected when I did freezer tests.

The last temperature rise seems to start at around 10:20, while the exif data in the photos seems to show touchdown around 9:20. Similarly the first picture after launch IMG_907 has an exif timestamp of 7:42:09. OTOH IMG_906 has a timestamp of 7:41:54 and Chris and Drew seem to be looking slightly up, so this photo might actually be very close to T-0.

Adrian mentioned that the timestamps on the pictures is off by about an hour which seems to be the case, I think 8:42 is pretty close to the actual launch time.

Which makes me curious, I assume that the log data was also captured by the camera, and it seems to have a different time base. Were the times adjusted for the spread sheet?

I'm not quite sure what to make of the shapes of the temperature curves. The standard atmosphere model predicts the temperature to drop to a local minimum until around 45 kft, and stay pretty constant up to 86 kft then rise again until just below 150kft, hold around the same up to around 170 kft, and then start to drop again.

We see a similar drop hold, rise hold a bit and drop, in the data, but I think that the second drop wasn't because we were above 150 kft, but rather because the relative wind caused a drop when the capsule started it's fall. This is consistent with some of the stuff I've read about the coldest conditions for a mission like this happening at the onset of free fall.

It looks like the bag did a pretty good job of retaining heat, and maybe even absorbing radiant heat.

For future launches I'd really love to have a thermistor outside the insulated capsule to get true atmospheric temperature.

Here is a java-based plot of the rawinsonde sent up by the NWS at about 11:15am GMT (7:15am EST) on the day of our launch, 8/22. So, that weather balloon went out of Greensboro about 1.5 hours before our first launch:

http://rucsoundings.noaa.gov/plot_soundings.cgi?data_source=RAOB;start_y...

Click on the chart, then move the mouse up and down over the chart to get the altitude and temp readings.

To get the text, click the 'Get Text' button (which includes the headers) from the java plot page, or go to this link for the text (no headers):

http://rucsoundings.noaa.gov/get_raobs.cgi?data_source=RAOB;start_year=2...

On the 'Get Text' window from the Java plot page, scan the "t/td (°C)" column. Note temperatures:
0°C by 15,997 feet
-50°C by 40,978 feet.

Lowest about -71.3°C (54,265 feet) before warming up to a balmy -38.1°C at 105,121 feet.

If I am reading it right....correct me if I'm mad.

-Trappe