Recap of EOSS-113

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Google Earth Map

by Balloon Track, N0KKZ

I've been incorporating a routine in Balloon Track to export Google Earth data files. These files are in KML language (basically XML). So, they are pretty easy to generate.

The program exports a bunch of information into this file

  • A track that follows the contours of the ground (up the sides of hills down the slopes of valleys)

  • A flat line that is plotted on the surface but doesn't follow the contours

  • A line that "flies" up to burst and descends back to the ground

  • A wall that depicts the track line through space. It is a series of lines extruded from the surface of the Earth rising up to the track line in the air. Having this wall helps anchor the track onto the ground. (shown above)

  • A "track line" that is actually the speed of the balloon as depicted by a line ascending and descending over the ground, the higher in altitude this line rises, the faster the speed of the balloon

  • All the waypoints that were used to create the plot.

Also, each of those lines above is actually composed of three lines, one covering each part of a balloon flight, the ascent, float if there is any and descent. So, you can turn on and off all of these elements in Google Earth when it suits your presentation purposes.

In the image above, I've set Google Earth to display only the Ascent and descent phases of the flight. I included the "wall" and the speed graph which shows the speed of the balloon at the associated location on the track. In this example the maximum speed is around 80 MPH, at burst the speed is around 76 MPH I think, so you can get a feel for when the balloon speeds up and slows down during the flight.

I may or may not decide to keep posting a screen capture of the flight overview to a separate page. They are pretty but really it's when the data file is loaded into Google Earth that the track "comes alive" as it were. I will most likely post the KML Google Earth file with each recap in the Data section on the opening page of the recap. The pretty pictures will be up to you to generate when you use the file to check out the flight.

Here is the data file for this flight.

 

 

 

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