MIT students captured this photograph of the Earth from 28 kilometres up using consumer electronics. (Justin Lee & Oliver Yeh/1337arts.com) Students at MIT have taken pictures from the upper stratosphere showing the curvature of the Earth under a black sky using off-the-shelf electronics that cost them about $160.

The three students behind the initiative, dubbed Project Icarus, used a weather balloon and a point-and-shoot camera to capture the images of Earth and a GPS-capable pre-paid cellphone to track the balloon.

The students — Oliver Yeh, Justin Lee and Eric Newton — estimate the balloon reached an altitude of more than 28 kilometres, or 93,000 feet, more than twice as high as commercial jets fly.

The group, which specializes in low-cost aerial photography that it displays and sells through a website called 1337arts, says others have sent out similar balloons but never using unmodified consumer electronics or on such a low budget.

The camera used in the project was a 7.1-megapixel Canon Powershot the students bought used on Amazon.com. They installed an open-source firmware add-on to the camera that would allow them to program it to take a picture every five seconds.

To track the location of the balloon, they used a $50 pre-paid Motorola cellphone with GPS capabilities and installed a free program that would report the phone's location at regular intervals. A USB phone charger powered by AA lithium batteries kept the phone running during the five-hour voyage. They also installed an external antenna to boost the phone's signal.

Even with the antenna, the phone lost reception at an altitude of less than a kilometre, and a software limitation prevented the flight log from recording altitudes more than six kilometres. The students estimated the altitude their balloon reached by extrapolating the data that was recorded and by using tracking information from similar balloons.

The camera caught this image of the burst balloon on its descent back to Earth. (Justin Lee & Oliver Yeh/1337arts.com) They kept all the electronics running in the cold of the stratosphere by packing all the gadgets into a Styrofoam beer cooler and adding an instant hand-warming pouch. A parachute slowed the cooler's descent to Earth after the balloon burst in the thin atmosphere.

The students launched the balloon from a field in Sturbridge, Mass., on Sept. 2 and recovered it five hours later at a construction site in Worcester, about 32 kilometres away. All the equipment was still functional after the landing, but the antenna was embedded into the ground, so it couldn't broadcast its location.

"We were lucky that the Motorola i290 managed to send out its GPS location before landing," the students wrote on 1337arts.com.

"We were also lucky that the capsule landed in a soft-earthed construction field with a clear view of the sky. Retrieval would definitely have been a much more difficult process had our device landed in a lake or in the forest."

The 1337arts website says the group is "dedicated to celebrating the marriage of art and science and promoting the beauty of scientific art."

A group of Spanish high school students captured similar images in February using a consumer camera, but they used custom-built electronics for tracking the balloon, at an estimated total cost of $1,590.

Lee said he hoped the simplicity and low cost of their project would inspire arts and science students in high schools to attempt their own high-altitude photography.