@J, I'm surprised 200-500 was as blurry as it was--must have been some real motion in there! Then too, we saw horizons at all kinds of crazy angles on ascent too, so I'm thinking maybe the strap on the Mk I capsule was just too long anyways... I didn't want to pull tons of extra string through those little razored Xs on the Mk II, so the lines were shorter just 'cause I was a little lazy (though attached to a longer chute--*shrug*). Maybe, too, the larger surface area of the box made it more susceptible to rocking in wind gusts... not sure.

Unfortunately, that means the idea of adding a star camera in a future launch would be right out--can't take astronomical pictures in < 1/500 second at any altitude... oh well; c'est la vie.

HD video would be neat at least inasmuch as we'd have frames every 30th of a second instead of every thirty seconds. That would give us some context for "what's happening now?"--and yeah, the apogee shot would be really cool--we'd definitely see balloon shards at burst altitude.

Amber mentioned to me that you guys didn't know that we had star imagery. When I was editing the full-size images from launch 1 I could certainly see a star or too. They're at best 1 pixel worth of image so they just get discarded when the images are downsized.

J