Homemade Hubble

You've got to love someone with a big, crazy idea and the passion to pull it off. What if you could send your own digital camera up into space to take pictures and then retrieve it to see how they turned out? These folks did exactly that, building a payload box containing a Nikon Coolpix set to take one image every minute. Then they attached the box to a huge weather balloon and set it free to soar until it reached, space, burst, and dropped the camera back down to earth.

All of the images are awesome, but the story is even better. Check it out.

And if that gets you hankerin' for some bigger budget space pix, head over to the gallery at hubblesite.com.

(HT: Youth Specialties' YSMarko blog)