doug-eclipse Photo credit: Doug Olson

On August 21, 2017 a full solar eclipse sliced a shadowy swath across the entire continental USA.  The totality area missed Minnesota by a few hundred miles so we only saw about 85% obscuration at our peak.

I thought it could be interesting to put a UAV in the sky during our partial eclipse and record the flight.  I didn’t expect too much, but you never know.  In the end we had a line of rain move through a few minutes before the peak and it was really hard to say if the temperature drop and less light was due to a wave of rain or due to the eclipse.

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Still, I needed to test some changes in the AuraUAS flight controller and was curious to see how the TECS system would fly with a completely unfiltered/raw/noisy airspeed input.  Why not roll all that together and go test fly!

Here is the full video of the 37 minute flight.  Even though this is slightly boring flight test video, you might find a few interesting things if you skip around.

  • I talk at the start and the end of the flight.  I can’t remember what I said, but I’m sure it is important and insightful.
  • I rendered the whole live flight track in the video using augmented reality techniques.  I think that’s pretty cool.
  • If you skip to the end, I pick up the plane and walk back to the runway.  I think that is the funnest part.  There I pan the airplane around the sky and show my flight path and approach drawn right into the real video using the same augmented reality techniques.
  • We had 100% cloud cover and zero view of the sun/moon.  But that doesn’t stop me from drawing the sun and moon in the view where it actually is.  Not surprisingly, they are sitting almost exactly on top of each other.  You can see this at the end of Part 3.
  • I flew a fully autonomous landing on this flight.  It worked out pretty well and shows up nicely at the end of Part 3.  If anyone is interested, the auto-land task is written as an embedded python script and runs right on-board in the main flight controller.  I think that might be pretty cool for people who are python fans.  If you want to geek out on the details you can see the whole landing script here: https://github.com/AuraUAS/aura-core/blob/master/src/mission/task/land2.py  (Then go watch it in action at the end of Part #3.)