tiabunna's photos with the keyword: balloons

Heading upward with rays of dawn sunlight (and a little lens flare). Best viewed large, maybe while listening to this track. I shall be away travelling for most of the next week and expect to have only limited and intermittent internet. Best wishes to all.

"Rachel" was the name given to the ancient (WW2 vintage) AA3 Mk VII anti-aircraft radar that had been used to track weather balloons at Macquarie Island since (I think) 1953. She lived in a small hut, to give some weather protection, with a radome above. One of our first tasks was to dismantle the hut and decommission her, to be replaced with a new WF2 radar.

Scanned from an old slide taken inside the fibreglass dome, hence the red cast. The old WW2-vintage radar we removed had automatic target tracking: this new one was fully manual. That's progress! But the WF2 could follow the weather balloons for about two hundred kilometers. On a windy day at Macquarie Island, the balloons often did not rise more than ten degrees above the horizon before disappearing in the distance, even though they climbed at about 300 metres/minute ...