Warming up!

I am trying to send a camera to the stratosphere and take some photos from there. This looks like the next NASA mission but it's, in fact, something quite possible to achieve on a reasonable budget, some consumer electronics and a lot of planning. High altitude ballooning is not new. Weather stations launch them twice a day to gather data from different layers of the atmosphere. And a lot of amateurs do it just for the fun and the challenge of it. The view of the earth from 40 Km away is astonishing: you can see the curvature of the planet, a thin blue atmosphere, and a pitch dark sky. And since getting oneself there is quite difficult as of now, I am just sending a camera to get a picture and come back for me :)