Going high

Our proposal for the Geocam has been selected to fly on-board a high altitude balloon campaign organized by the Louisiana Space Consortium. It will be launched from Fort Sumner, NM. Movies taken from high altitude balloons can be found at the University of Montana within the BOREALIS High Altitude Balloon program.

We expect to use an JVC Everio Hard Disk Camcorder in order to fit our tiny requirements.

Seeing through takes time

When Mikhail Vorontsov talks (Anisoplanatic imaging through turbulent media: image recovery by local information fusion from a set of short-exposure images, [J. Opt. Soc. Am. A/ Vol. 18, No. 6/June 2001]) about superresolution, he is basically saying that the turbulence located between the camera and the object of interest will help in focusing. The idea is that turbulence will bend rays of lights and allow for micro-lensing to occur. It is interesting that in effect, this idea cannot be applied to Space for short distances. In Space however, while there is no turbulence, one can rely on gravity to bend light and allow for this micro-lensing to occur. This is how the latest Earth like object was found. The technique itself has to figure out which frames and what part of the frame is the one of highest quality. This is no small feat. In effect, one has to determine a criterion that evaluates the quality of focus for every part of the frame and has to perform the fusion of these "lucky" parts of the frame.