Weather balloons to capture eclipse from 100,000 feet

While millions of people are craning their necks toward the sky to see Monday's solar eclipse, Tory Carissimo will be preparing himself a bird's-eye view — in fact, better than that.

Carissimo began sending up high-altitude weather balloons from Canandaigua in 2016 as a way to indulge his interest in technology and put to use a gift from his wife. Monday will be the ninth launch, and in some ways the most challenging.

"Typically we know the launch location and wait for the day and time to make it work," he said. "This one's a little backwards because the time is set; the eclipse is happening with or without us."

The balloons go more than 100,000 feet, or 19 miles, more than three times the height of Mount Everest and more than twice the altitude of a cruising airplane on an international flight. Made of latex, they are about 6 feet in diameter on the ground but expand to 32 feet at their peak due to reduced pressure, before popping in spectacular fashion and falling back to Earth with a parachute.

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Their payload is a Styrofoam container the size of a cooler with three cameras nestled inside, pointing outward. Carissimo has posted some incredible footage on the website of his organization, Overlook Horizon High Altitude Balloons: overlookhorizon.com.

Carissimo, a software engineer by trade, first got interested in balloons when his wife bought him an Arduino mini-computer as a gift. It is feather-light, the size of a fingernail and very powerful, and he needed to find something to do with it.

"At first, I just got it to make an LED light blink on and off, and I showed it to her, and she was like, 'Yeah, that's great,'" he said.

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The high-altitude balloons are somewhat more impressive than that. The mini-computer serves as a flight tracker, while Carissimo takes in different meteorological data to estimate when and where his apparatus will come down after bursting in near-outer space.

"I love science and space and NASA and all that kind of stuff," he said. "If I can build something and send it to the edge of space, that’s right up my alley."

As of Sunday afternoon, he thought Monday's flight would land somewhere between Skaneateles and Otisco lakes, about 60 miles from where he and his fellow enthusiasts will launch, at 1:10 p.m. at Canandaigua Academy.

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While 100,000 feet seems pretty high, it doesn't close much of the distance to the moon, which is 238,900 miles from Earth. One camera on the balloon will capture the eclipse, but Carissimo is more interested in two other cameras that will be filming the shadow moving across the Finger Lakes.

If, as he hopes, the flight takes a little less than three hours, and if, as he hopes, the balloon doesn't land in a tree or a lake, Carissimo will retrieve and upload the video footage to his site Monday night or Tuesday.

More:Overlook Horizon's Facebook page

More generally, he hopes to engage local science classes in future launches, whether to carry their experiments toward the top of the atmosphere or simply to watch.

Already, more than 10,000 people have watched live ground broadcasts of the launches and recoveries, or gone to see them afterward.

"We’re not selling anything or making money off it," he said. "We’re just spreading education, getting students and teachers involved. My hope is a student, even an adult for that matter, will say, 'Wow, look what they did — I wonder what I can do.'"

JMURPHY7@Gannett.com