Introduction
Hello, and welcome to CatsEyes Aerial Photography. This site is about using radio controlled (R/C) aircraft for Aerial Photography (AP) and for researching and documenting rail history.
At last!
At long last I have begun doing what I set out to do some years ago! That is, to fly a small radio controlled plane to take photographs of an abandoned rail line for documentation purposes. On July 12, 2008, I flew the Cat's Eye 1 at Crysler, ON (45º13'N, 75º9'W) (Google Maps) (Google Earth). Crysler had a station on the New York and Ottawa Railway (NYO), which ran from Ottawa to Cornwall, where it crossed the St. Lawrence River and hooked up with a number of American rail lines. It was abandoned in 1957.
Please visit the Crysler page for an overview, or if you just want to see the photos, see the gallery.
Hopefully this will be the beginning of many more photo flights. I hope to add a lot more content related to the abandoned railroads in our region, featuring aerial views of the surviving vestiges of these lines. The rest of this site is about the mechanics of my Aerial Photography platforms and the development that has and is going into them.
Platform status
The Cat's Eye 1
has
proven itself to be a worthy successor to the
Long-nose Getter. It
has the same stability and control and ability to fly in moderately
breezy conditions. However, it is lighter (all-up weight about 40 oz
or 1134g), and was designed from the
start to be hand launched, allowing it to be used in situations where
the Getter could not. This was proven at th e Crysler site
where I flew from a fallow field of vegitation half way to my knees.
Launching and landing the Cat's Eye 1
was very easy under such conditions, whereas a wheeled vehicle,
requiring a "landing strip" for takeoff and landing, would have been
much more difficult or impossible.
In short I am very happy with the Cat's Eye 1 and it has now become my primary photo plane. Further development continues, of course. I am in the process of re-outfitting the Long-nose Getter to have a video downlink. This should allow much better control for lining up shots. It also opens up the possibility of piloting the craft by video (FPV) to allow more flexibility in where it can be used. All this, however, will take time and I am not expecting to have all the bugs worked out this year.
In the mean time, I will be using the Cat's Eye 1 (piloted in a more conventional manner) for further aerial research at other sites that I have lined up.