Clouds

September. 18, 2014. Aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson somewhere in the Pacific.

U.S. Navy photo by John Philip Wagner Jr.

Perlan Project

 

Pressurized (!) Perlan Glider. 65 foot wingspan.

Some crazy people are going to try and fly a glider to an altitude of 100,000 feet over the North Pole.

Mother of Pearl Cloud by Luke Harrison

Evidently in the Polar regions there are some exceptional atmospheric conditions, especially where there are mountains nearby, which might make this stunt feasible.

On Aug. 29, 2006, Einar Enevoldson (left) and Steve Fossett set a new world glider altitude record. They wore NASA spacesuits to ward off the cold inside their glider's unpressurized tandem cockpit. The record was set in El Calafate, Argentina, in Perlan, a high performance research glider based on a German-built DG-505. Fossett and Enevoldson made the first glider flight into the earth’s stratosphere, reaching a height of 50,671 feet (15,447 m). They broke the previous record, set in 1986 in California, by 1,662 feet (507 m).

If the name Steve Fossett rings a bell, it's because he has been involved in a number of aerial adventures. He died in a small plane crash in California back in 2007. Einar Enevoldson is a former NASA research pilot.

Other altitude records:

• Amateur rocket reaches 121,000 ft 
• Helicopter Altitude Record
• Focke Wulf Fw 61 - luftwaffe test pilot Hanna Reitsch
• B-58 Hustler
• Pic of the Day
• Felix Baumgartner - Space Man
• Caproni Ca. 161bis

P.S. From Wikipedia's article: "A sailplane at 90,000 feet altitude flies in approximately the same aerodynamic regime--Mach and Reynolds numbers--to be experienced by a moderate size aircraft flying near the surface of Mars." 

A Perfect Day For Bananafish

Storm approaching Sydney Australia. Photo by Jem Cresswell

I found this photo along with the title on this isn't happiness. Even though I have no idea what a bananafish is (probably something very unpleasant), I thought it was just the right combination. Turns out the title is from a short story by J.D. Salinger. Detroit Steve got me started.

Update January 2024 replaced missing image. The old image was hot-linked, and the image disappeared from that website, so it disappeared from this blog as well. This is unacceptable, so I took the file name of the image and gave it to Google and it found only one image and it was the correct one. I'm surprised, the file name is just ten digits which gives you an address space of ten billion. Since there are approximately one zillion squared images floating around it seems like Google should have found more than one instance, but it didn't.