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This rocket is a general-purpose aerial photography camera rocket. The design suspends the payload section horizontally and the camera takes pictures looking down on descent of the parachute. Since the camera is motorized it takes an entire roll of film per flight. The switches for the electronics are mounted in the payload section coupler and are activated at separation. The payload section is balanced to have the lens of the camera at the balancing point to minimize blurred pictures. Altogether there were four rockets called Eye in the Sky.

My first camera rocket, the un-named rocket on the Miscellaneous Rockets page, may have been called “Eye in the Sky” but I’m not sure. It was built in 1988 and used the Minolta Freedom 100 camera in a modified LOC Ultimate kit. I don’t recall ever getting any good pictures from that rocket so I don’t include it on this page.

I had trouble clustering the Ultimate, so my next design incorporated a single 54 mm motor mount and added a boat-tail to the 4” tubing. I also changed the fin

design to a delta shape so it was basically like a LOC EZI-65 with a boat-tail. At that time the 3” body tubes were not available so the large airframe required the large motor mount. I also had the distorted notion that higher was better. This is the first rocket I called Eye in the Sky. I flew this rocket several times at LDRS 7 and 8 in Hartsel, CO and even wrote an article that appeared in the October 1988 issue of the Tripolitian. This version was lost trying to get a 10,000 foot flight on a J125. It had a beautiful take-off but was never recovered.

The next version of the Eye in the Sky utilized the new 3” tubing and went to three fins. Although not an altitude design I kept the boat-tail to try to get the most altitude for a given motor. I also went to the 38 mm motor mount with this design. I flew this version many times taking excellent pictures with the Olympus Infinity S camera. It too was lost trying to make a high altitude attempt on a Vulcan I283.

With the advent of smaller cameras I wanted to achieve the same altitude but with smaller motors to reduce the cost. I decided that the payload section could be incorporated into the shoulder of the nose cone eliminating the hole for the camera. This new design resulted in a smaller, better performing Eye in the Sky. The shoulder was constructed from plywood and held the camera, timing circuit, battery and switches as well as a piezo-buzzer and circuit to aid in finding the payload section. I reduced the body tube diameter to 2.63” but kept the same design for the fins and boat-tail. This design used the Konica A4 originally and lasted many flights. After a long career of taking excellent photographs, it was retired due to some cracks that developed in the payload section.

I went back to the reliable, easy to use, 3” design with a traditional payload section using the Olympus Hi-Lite camera. This camera is excellent for rocket photography and I still use them today in the Eyes in the Sky camera rocket.