The Gunston School Near Space Balloon Team was offered an opportunity to add a payload to a balloon launch by NASA engineer Gerad Cote during the total solar eclipse this past Monday. The students have been working with Dale Wegner, P’13 to develop a system to stream live photos from balloon payloads. Although our streaming system had not yet been fully tested on a balloon mission, the students were excited to take advantage of this once in a lifetime opportunity to photograph during the solar eclipse from space!

Our streaming system was launched for the first time on Monday and reached altitudes up to 20 miles, above 99% of the Earth's atmosphere. The launch took place near Burlington, Vermont where totality occurred just before 3:30 p.m. Mr. Cotes and his immediate family performed the launch and plan to recover the payload and return it to Gunston. 

The small, light-weight camera on the payload sends back packets of information that must be recorded by Raspberry Pi-based radio receiver ground stations. A server program then assembles the packets received by the ground stations into images. A Raspberry Pi-based radio receiver ground station can be used to listen to telemetry and data from a satellite. A simple ground station can be made from a Raspberry Pi, a static antenna, and a software-defined radio (SDR) dongle. An SDR is a radio wave receiver that can pick up signals from a variety of frequencies, including digital television, AM, FM and DAB radio broadcasts, and aircraft transponders. 

While Gunston’s payload did return some photos, it was unable to capture the solar eclipse. “We knew it would be a long shot to get a usable image, especially when we’re not able to actually point the camera. Each of the four cameras we sent up are capable of taking a picture every two minutes,” explains Dr. Wilson. Additionally, the ground station antennas blew over and some ground stations didn’t connect. “Once we get the equipment back, there may be more images we can inspect,” he adds.

Despite not capturing the solar eclipse, the project was a success and triumph of team work that took place with relatively short notice. Willem Grant ’27 worked with the ground stations that received information from the payload over HAM radio frequencies while Dylan Chiochetti ’27 soldered components of the ground stations. Lucas Watkins ’26 implemented an Oracle computing server to receive data from the ground stations and form the final images.

These students are part of the Gunston Science and Engineering Club mentored by Dr. Wilson, Dr. Goodall, and Mr. Reading. The technology behind the mission was developed by Mr. Wegner working with other members of the Near Space Balloon hobbyist community.

Meanwhile, back on Gunston’s campus, students and faculty used special eclipse glasses and Do-It-Yourself pinhole cameras to view the eclipse. The following image was taken by Tommy McGeady ’25 with a 60x telescopic lens. “I slapped some solar filter in front of it and took a bunch of photos! Went through a little bit of post-processing just to clean it up,” he explained.

“The experience for me and the sailing team was absolutely surreal,” said Mr. Tom Chafey, “I’ll never forget the experience. We, as a school, were blessed and welcomed having such an amazing and iconic opportunity to witness.”