After the media storm that followed the official shooting down of an alleged Chinese spy balloon, the United States Air Force downed three other unidentified objects. There is an increasing possibility they were harmless civilian weather balloons.
People commonly send up cameras on weather balloons these days to shoot photos and videos from extreme altitudes, but one Russian man recently did something different: he flew a camera drone to 33,000 feet (~10km).
I recently dipped my toe for the first time in the world of alpinism, also known as mountaineering. I took part in a course teaching basic alpinism skills, and at the same time shot photos of the course for Mountain Network, the agency that organized it. I’d prepared for this assignment by reading up on how to shoot photos in this unique environment. Some of the tips I’d found on the Internet came in handy, but I also learned some things I hadn’t read about before, which I thought I’d share here.
Strapping GoPro cameras to high-altitude weather balloons to shoot photos and videos of the edge of space has been growing in popularity, but on GoPro just captured something incredible that no GoPro had before: an extremely close flyby of a passenger airliner at 38,000 feet.