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Date: 27th July 2013
Location: Doonside, NSW, Australia
Conditions:  Sunny, very light winds < 5km/h early, 20C
Team Members at Event:  GK, Paul K, and John K.

Hawaii

We got back into flying again during the last week as we had a short 2-week break for a holiday in Hawaii. Hawaii was great as we spent a week cruising between the islands and then spent a week on Oahu enjoying the sun and sights. Dad spent 5 weeks in Europe during the same time, so water rocket development has been quiet. The rocket experiment we wanted to launch wasn't finished in time for this launch and so will be launched during the next NSWRA launch.

Our cruise ship in port in Nawiliwili, Kauai

Sailing past the Na Pali coast on Kauai

Sanding rockets on Waikiki Beach

Inspecting Harpoon Missile in Pearl Harbour

GoPro Hero 3

I've had my eye on a GoPro for quite a while after seeing all the great footage you can get from it. So while in Hawaii I picked up the Black edition with the Wi-fi remote control.

We took it for a spin this weekend at the launch and tried a couple of different camera angles. The wide field of view is very useful and it is simple to point the camera as you only need to point it in the general direction. I only had a slower 16Gb microSD card on hand before the launch so we only filmed in 1920x1080p @ 30fps. Any faster frame rates or larger frame sizes resulted in stuttering video. I ordered a SanDisk Extreme 16Gb micro SD card but it hadn't arrived by the time of the launch. I am keen to try the 848 x 480 @ 240fps mode as that is more than twice the number of pixels at that frame rate compared to our Casio Exilim FC100.

GoPro Hero 3 with remote control

Giraffe's view of launch. The GoPro is mounted on the end of the boom

Launch Day

We put the GoPro on the end of a long boom on the tripod so that we could get a close-in giraffe's point of view of the launches. A couple of times the slight breeze caused a resonance in the boom which resulted in shaky video. The boom was just some 20x20 aluminium angle we had on hand. Overall I was really happy with the video quality though. We converted the footage down to 1280x720 for YouTube. Unfortunately the footage is compressed when we export it from the video editing software and then YouTube re-compresses it again. You loose a bit of the quality that way. We could upload it at 1080p but the upload would take a long time.

Stills from the video also turned out great. We also filmed a lot of the Pyro rockets on the day with the setup.

PET rail buttons

For the first Axion II flight we tested a couple of simple guide rail buttons made from PET plastic to see how well they would work. On the one launch they looked like they worked fine but don't quite feel strong enough. We will try them again with thicker PET plastic made from 2L apple juice bottles. We probably wouldn't use these for our larger rockets, but for smaller rockets they should be sufficient and are easy to make. The rocket nearly got stuck in a tree but passed the rocket eating trees within a couple of meters.

Simple rail button

Second rail button further up

We then flew the Axion IV rocket two times with foam. We again tried the GoPro from a couple of different angles. Both flights went well without problems and it's always good to get them back.
 

Milky way?

Paul also launched his new "Black Thunder" (Estes Xarconian Cruiser) rocket that he made from a kit before the holidays. He launched it a couple of times on a C6-3.

Highlights video

Here is more footage from the launch day using the GoPro both from the Giraffe's point of view as well as from a Chipmunk's point of view.

Pyro Rocket highlights video

More photos from the day are available here:
http://www.nswrocketry.org.au/gallery/2013_Launches/Doonside_2013_07_27/01_photos_Jul.html

Flight Details