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This site is intended for anyone interested in astronomy, and particularly anyone who would like to be a member of the Bootham School Astronomy Society. This membership is available to all members of the Bootham community, and students from other York schools who have attended the ISSP course on astronomy at Bootham. If you choose to subscribe by email, you will receive an email of any new post within about twenty four hours. There will also be twitter updates before an observatory session, and you are recommended to follow me on twitter using the button on the right of this screen.

Thursday 29 November 2012

Morning meeting, 30th November

Hopefully, you're visiting this post because you wanted to see some pictures of Joe Kitter doing his record-breaking skydive in 1959. If you got here, well done for listening!

Kittinger key facts;

Project codename: Excelsior
Maximum height reached: 31.3 km above the Earth
maximum speed during free fall: 988km per hour
time to climb: 90 minutes
time to fall: 13mins 45 secs


In this one, you can see him just exiting the capsule



Here he is after landing


this is a life-sized copy of the capsule - note how small it is!


Joe Kittinger was with Felix Baumgartner's ground control team when his record was finally beaten in 2012, after an amazing 53 years.

what will tomorrow's meeting be about?
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