mood: archivial

Back in the mid-to-late 1990’s my primary hobby was model and high power rocketry (I’ve since gotten tired of seeing my money go up in smoke ). While many get into going for record altitudes or extreme power, my main interests were funky designs and camera payloads. Some other time I’ll have to write about the former (like my UFO made out of a Slurpee lid), but I figured I’d resurrect an old web site I put up in 1996 related to the latter.

Basically I and a couple of my friends (Mike Kruger & Steve Lubliner) worked up a combination of an inexpensive 35mm auto-advance camera (the “Vivitar Opus 35, price then about $35) and a simple circuit based on a 555 electronic timer chip. When the rocket lifted off the pad, it’d start taking pictures every second or two until it ran out of film. Hardly the first time this had been done in the hobby, but most previous effort hadn’t been nearly so cheap (cameras along these lines usually cost as much as digital cameras do these days). And much better results have been achieved since, especially with digital or video cameras. However, I was (and still am) pretty happy with the results I got. I’ve resurrected the web page pretty much as it was then (just fixed a couple really stupid html errors that messed it up in a modern browser and removed the old email address). Back in the day it got a pretty good response, if you google me you’ll still find dead links to the page where it used to be on primenet.com. At some point I’ll make better scans of the negatives and put them up in the gallery.