a dog-eared town

Take a look at the following picture.

Looks like a nice pic from Nasa, right? Wrong.

Behold the view from 117,597 feet, taken on August 11, 2007 by a camera hanging from a helium balloon launched by a group of guys in Alberta, Canada. Called the SABLE-3 (Southern Alberta Balloon Launch Experiment #3), the balloon’s small payload box was packed with a Byonics MicroTrak 300 APRS tracking device, a Nikon Coolpix P2 digital camera set to snap one picture per minute, and filled with enough helium to take it to the edge of the earth’s atmosphere.

I found the photo on Gizmodo. They have a bunch of other photographs that are absolutely amazing. It’s also incredible to think these are everyday people doing work that at one point was literally only able to be done by governments. Thank goodness there are people out there pushing the realms of what humans can do.