Saturday, August 11, 2007

As of 11:45pm EDT tonight, Soli Deo Gloria 6 is still aloft and maintaining a fairly steady float altitude. It has recently crossed from Ohio into Kentucky, still heading south at a leisurely pace of about 10 miles per hour.

We expect the altitude to continue to drop overnight but the flight should continue into tomorrow.
Soli Deo Gloria 6 - our sixth superpressure balloon - was launched today near Findlay, Ohio, during Bill Brown's celebration of 20 years of amateur high altitude ballooning.

The balloon is currently floating at about 7000 feet and lazily heading south. It has passed the first milestone of achieving stable float - next will be surviving peak downward solar flux in about an hour. The final milestone today - if the flight continues - will be stable float beyond sunset.

Here are a couple of links for tracking the balloon while it's aloft:

http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/find.cgi?call=kc8uch-11

http://db.aprsworld.net/datamart/switch.php?call=kc8uch-11&maps=yes

More details will be posted later.