(7370x2261, 21662 kb) Gaelen and Marie cover blue foam panels with aluminised mylar to fabricate the sun shields. At left Marie's husband Adam works on (presumably) non-BLAST-related illustration.
These pictures were taken, like the rest of the shots, with my Canon S230, but then aligned using autopano-sift, stitched together using the hugin front-end to the Panotools library, and then blended using enblend. Some final cropping and touch ups are done with The GIMP, and, lastly, the images are converted from TIFFs to something more Web-friendly using ImageMagick.
(7370x2261, 21662 kb) Gaelen and Marie cover blue foam panels with aluminised mylar to fabricate
the sun shields. At left Marie's husband Adam works on (presumably)
non-BLAST-related illustration.
(4912x1112, 5799 kb) The view of rollout on the pad from the roof of the tower. ARCADE is at right
on The Boss. The balloon is still in its crate at left.
(4026x1326, 5917 kb) Start of inflation. The top of the balloon is held down at this point.
(11688x1216, 13900 kb) The flightline from the centre of the pad. The people at left are the ARCADE
scientists. (Everyone else is down below at the edge of the pad.)
(2694x1119, 3727 kb) With inflation complete, Chris scans the flightline, waiting for launch.
(8224x1368, 13235 kb) A shot of the highbay after a brief power outage, which tripped the lights.
Included in this image is 0.75 Enzos and about 1.5 Matts.
(7860x1316, 8590 kb) A shot of storm clouds to the east.
(7724x1280, 15053 kb) Here's a panorama of Palestine Avenue from the hotel parking lot.