The sky was a perfect bright blue on the late morning of the eclipse. But for the University of Maine High Altitude Ballooning Team, the big issue was the wind, which made it difficult for this group of eight to hang on to the large weather balloon they were inflating.
The group didn’t have this exact launch location picked out until Friday, and it was subject to change until Monday morning.
"I set my alarm last night for 4 a.m.," said Noah Lambert, a junior computer engineering student at the University of Maine. "So I got up, and got breakfast and was onto campus at 4:35 this morning."
The group left Orono at around 5:30 a.m. and drove toward their destination.
"I don’t even know where I am," Lambert said with a laugh.
They arrived just north of Jackman at a sugar shack farm about three miles from the Canadian border.
"We were prepared to go as far west as upstate New York, but it turns out this is as good as we can get here," said Rick Eason, a professor emeritus with the University of Maine who helps lead the High Altitude Ballooning Team. "We won’t quite be on the center line of totality when it comes by, but we’ll be close enough."
This is launch No. 138 for the UMaine group, which conducts about a dozen a year.
But this one is special, because it's part of a nationwide project led by Montana State University with about 75 other universities around the country. Those institutions launched their own balloons from more than 50 locations along the path of totality.
Lambert said he has spent nearly 600 hours helping to design the payloads, which are cubes of lightweight foam painted orange. Inside are batteries, satellite trackers and camera lenses, which Lambert said should offer a unique view from the path of totality.
"We can see the shadow on the Earth as it is going by," he said. "There’s not many photos or videos of that before, and so we should be able to do that today and get an actual live video of it."
And so the setup began. The students lay out and weigh the payloads.
They can’t be too heavy, or it won’t lift. To find the right balance of neutral buoyancy, the students used a laundry detergent container filled with water to test whether the balloon can lift into the sky on its own.
Lambert said the group was eyeing a launch at about 1:45 p.m., enough time for the balloon to lift about 90,000 feet into the air and capture the big moment around 3:30 p.m.
"We’ll probably launch about two hours or so before actual totality, and so that gives us plenty of time to get up into the air and then start our venting, so then we start slowing down and get to our stable altitude," Lambert said.
They checked the batteries and made sure the satellite devices to track the balloon’s location were working.
Several miles away, a group of three others from UMaine have set up a ground station satellite dish, which will transmit the feed from the balloon.
Then, the students inflated the balloon with helium.
The wind picked up, and it was difficult to keep hold on the balloon as it expanded to about six feet in diameter.
With about five minutes to go, the group maneuvered the balloon so that the group had a clear run at an open field for the launch.
Eason took the lead and took off, the others following behind. They ran through a snow-covered field.
"[There's] no wind, it's time!" Eason said.
Eason and the students let go, and the balloon quickly lifted into the air. The students cheered. Eason let out a sigh of relief.
With the balloon in the air, the group was off to its next destination.
"It will come down somewhere to the south, and we’ll just have to go fetch it," Eason said.
The team has never lost a balloon, yet, Eason said. And so using satellite and visual images, the group will attempt to find and recover it.
The flight went well, Eason said later Monday evening. The balloon popped a little early, but the group was able recover the payloads. They found the balloon itself outside of Dexter, Eason said.
