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Water Rockets

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Day 205 - Tall Tripod

Date:	15th June 2019
Location:	Whalan Reserve, Australia
Conditions:	Sunny, wind calm, 20C
Members:	PK, Paul K, John K and GK

Tall Tripod

This week we decided to raise a camera up on a taller tripod to try to get a different perspective on our launches. We also wanted to see if we can film a close up of the start of the air pulse as the water ran out. We had an old bike stand that is used for supporting a bicycle when doing maintenance on it. It is heavy and nice and sturdy. Then we attached a GoPro to the end of a 3m long PVC pipe that we also had lying around. When the PVC pipe was threaded on top of the stand, we ended up with a tripod around 4m tall.

The GoPro has a wide angled lens so pointing it in the right direction really wasn't an issue. We just used its wifi remote control to start and stop recording.

On the first launch we used the 22mm nozzle to try to get a lot of water to exit fairly low to the ground. We also filmed the launch from the ground so that we could replay the flight and see at what height the water actually ran out. We could see that it ran out just near the top of the guide rail. The GoPro managed to get a shot of the air pulse in the bottom of the frame.

Next we switched to the 9mm nozzle to raise the air pulse further off the ground. This time we pointed the GoPro further up. On this launch the air pulse happened much higher than the camera was pointed at. We again could see this from replaying back the ground shot. We had used 1.5L of water for that flight so for the next flight we reduced the water down to 1L so that the water would run out sooner.

On that flight the air pulse was closer to the ground and the camera managed to catch just the start of it but still mostly out of frame.

So for the next flight we reduced the water to 900mL And this time the camera managed to catch a good portion of the air pulse. 

Here are some photos from the day.

Flight Details