Daytime aspect camera for balloon altitudes

Kurtis L. Dietz; Brian D. Ramsey; Cheryl D. Alexander; Jeff A. Apple; Kajal Ghosh; Wesley R. Swift

doi:10.1117/1.1501566

1 October 2002 Daytime aspect camera for balloon altitudes

Kurtis L. Dietz, Brian D. Ramsey, Cheryl D. Alexander, Jeff A. Apple, Kajal Ghosh, Wesley R. Swift

Optical Engineering, Vol. 41, Issue 10, (October 2002). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.1501566

We have designed, built, and flight-tested a new star camera for daytime guiding of pointed balloon-borne experiments at altitudes around 40 km. The camera and lens are commercially available, off-the-shelf components, but require a custom-built baffle to reduce stray light, especially near the sunlit limb of the balloon. This new camera, which operates in the 600- to 1000-nm region of the spectrum, successfully provides daytime aspect information of ≈10 arcsec resolution for two distinct star fields near the galactic plane. The detected scattered-light backgrounds show good agreement with the Air Force MODTRAN models used to design the camera, but the daytime stellar magnitude limit was lower than expected due to longitudinal chromatic aberration in the lens. Replacing the commercial lens with a custom-built lens should allow the system to track stars in any arbitrary area of the sky during the daytime.

©(2002) Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)

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Kurtis L. Dietz, Brian D. Ramsey, Cheryl D. Alexander, Jeff A. Apple, Kajal Ghosh, and Wesley R. Swift "Daytime aspect camera for balloon altitudes," Optical Engineering 41(10), (1 October 2002). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.1501566

Published: 1 October 2002

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