2021 So Far

Far Horizons, GONet and the Chicago Transect Experiment

January 2021 was the ninth straight month working from home and I was getting a bit stir crazy. A friend former coworker of mine asked me some questions about serverless and AWS Lambda functions over the holidays in December about processing images. I know he had volunteered for years at the Adler Planetarium, and this project intrigued me so I started helping him out. As I got deeper into things I learned that the project involved python, Raspberry PI’s, electronics and science. All of which interest so I found myself working as a volunteer with the Adler Far Horizons group on the GONet Project. I worked on the image processing workflow using AWS Lambda functions to split and catalog the images. This was part of the The Chicago Transect Experiment, you can read and see more information on it there.

The experiment and preliminary data was presented at the 2021 eALAN Conference. Shortly thereafter preparation was being made for a new flight for NITElite, the High Altitude Balloon project. It had been two years, due to COVID, since the last flight. The payload and the parachute both have 2M APRS trackers in them, which awoke a long forgotten interest in Radio Communications.