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For Tony Rafaat, the sky isn't the limit, it's just the launching pad.
While surfing the net two years ago, the 41-year-old Albertan came across some visually stunning photographs of the Earth from way, way up that a man from California had captured in the 1990s, all with a big balloon and a "regular old" camera.
Mr. Rafaat's imagination soared.
He conjured up an image in his mind so elusive that only a select few - chief among them NASA's Hubble Space Telescope - have been able to catch on photo paper.
This picture, taken from 35,279 metres (117,597 feet) above the ground, was buried among 196 images snapped by a digital camera sent up in a weather balloon by Tony Rafaat, an Alberta schoolteacher. (Tony Rafaat)
"I thought to myself, 'Wow. I'd love to get a photo from near space, or the upper edge of the stratosphere ... with the curvatures of the Earth, the layers of the atmosphere, and the dark space.' "
Far from being one of those kids who dreamt of becoming an astronaut, Mr. Rafaat - a rural outreach schoolteacher by day and self-professed science-fiction geek by night - simply thought the ambitious photo would be "neat." Mr. Rafaat, who runs a small professional photography business on the side, was further sold by the idea that he could do it on a shoestring budget with his students.
"What's neat about this is that your average individual can essentially launch a space mission, and recover it. It's amazing," he said from his home in Hanna, Alta.
Two years, three attempts and $487 later, Mr. Rafaat finally has that photograph.
Using a Kaysam weather balloon (bought as part of six-pack from New Jersey), a used Nikon Coolpix P2 digital camera purchased off eBay, and a global positioning system tracking device, Mr. Rafaat and two of his balloon-enthusiast friends, Barry Sloan and James Ewen, released SABLE-3 (Southern Alberta Balloon Launch Experiment) at 9:31 a.m. on Aug. 11. The camera - set to take photos at one-minute intervals - and the GPS were put into a Styrofoam box. That payload, built by Mr. Rafaat's Grade 7 science class, was affixed to a parachute, the parachute to the helium-filled balloon.
Up it went.
From there, the trio tracked the balloon's position as it gained altitude. At about 36 kilometres above the ground, the balloon had expanded from 1.5 metres in diameter on Earth to more than 12 metres in near-space. The low atmospheric pressure caused it to burst 2½ hours later. The camera touched down after 45 minutes in a farmer's field about 100 kilometres away, in Vegreville, Alta.
The camera's metal casing was freezing cold, Mr. Rafaat recalls. "At first I was relieved that we got it back. Relieved and excited," he said. "Then I wanted to see the pictures."
And there it was, buried among the 196 shots the camera had taken.
The hobby isn't new, but as Mr. Rafaat puts it, "Relative to football, it's not popular."
Amateur radio enthusiasts have been sending helium-filled weather balloons, complete with GPS and tracking devices, up into the clouds for decades. What is new is how high Mr. Rafaat's balloon went, how clear and unobstructed the prize photo is, and the fact that Mr. Rafaat and his team were able to retrieve the payload once it came crashing back to Earth.
The photo didn't come easy. Mr. Rafaat's first attempt, during the May long weekend last year, didn't exactly take off. The wind from the east was unusually strong and the balloon got caught in trees just a few kilometres from where it was released.
"Everything was intact, but we had bruised egos," he said.
They tried again two months later. That time, the tracking device simply stopped transmitting data. They were never able to find the parachute.
Now that he has his photograph blown up and on his office wall, what's next?
"We'll do it again," he said.
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