"Snapshot" is a 3" diameter, 66" tall camera-carrying rocket designed to fly on 38 mm motors. The camera is a 35 mm Olympus Elite triggered to take an entire roll of film with each frame exposed at pre-determined intervals. The project inspiration came from reading about Doug Gerrard’ s Level 3 project, "My Mind’ s Eye", flown at last year’ s LDRS and published in the December 1999 HPR. I contacted Doug in California to ask him about camera projects. Over a series of emails, Doug became instrumental in helping me with design ideas and camera wiring.
"Snapshot" is wrapped in two layers of 3.7 oz S-glass and one layer of 2 oz. fiberglass used as a sanding veil. G-10 fins, a PML nosecone and Blacksky rail buttons complete the rocket. The brains of the rocket include an Adept AS3T launch detector and a custom made, 2 to 10 second programmable interval timer designed and constructed by our very own Pat Floyd. Recovery is triggered by a Missleworks RRC2 set to fire at apogee with motor ejection used as backup. The rocket is built to recover as two separate components. The fin can comes down on a 30" Top Flight parachute. The camera payload recovers on a 36" Skyangle cross-form chute attached to a special harness designed to aim the camera at any one of several downward angles. I used the Skyangle with its heavy-duty swivel to limit spinning as the payload descended.
The second flight was on an H123 hitting 1200’. Many of the photos from that flight were shots of the scrub grass on our launch site as I decided to fly without changing the launch delay timing that tells the camera when to begin taking pictures. It was still set for a 2700 to 3000’ ride.
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All in all, the "Snapshot" is a fun project and I’m anxious to fly it at Sheridan in two weeks.
Kent Newman |
