A group of six Yalies went trekking Saturday through a dim forest in Liberty Hill, Conn., in search of a treasured, Styrofoam box.

“It felt like we were in the middle of nowhere in the woods,” John Kim ’11 said.

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After roughly 40 minutes had passed, sunlight was fading and the group was growing concerned and feeling unsafe.

“We were beginning to lose hope,” Kim said.

The box, which contained a digital camera holding prized aerial images of Earth, was attached to a meter-wide, helium-filled balloon the students had launched that afternoon in the open field near Sloane Physics Laboratory on Science Hill. The students were members of Design at Yale, a graphic design club started this past September by Kim, the group’s co-president. They had inserted a cell phone into the box in order to track the balloon’s location via GPS, and the camera inside automatically took photos every 10 seconds with the goal of capturing high-resolution digital images from space that showed the curvature of the Earth.

After about an hour of searching using an iPhone that was receiving coordinates from the balloon’s cell phone, group member Zach Rotholz ’11 spotted the box, and the students started to cheer.

Then and there, still in the dark forest, the students put the camera’s memory card into a laptop to see if they had captured their much-anticipated photos.

“It was a very proud moment for all of us,” Kim said. “I never thought I’d be able to take pictures from space.”

The laptop screen lit up, and after scrolling through the more than 700 newly loaded photos, the students saw that the camera had successfully captured the images showing the curvature of the earth. A second round of screams broke out.

(Click here to watch Kim’s video documentary of the group launching the balloon, recovering the styrofoam box and retrieving the photos taken from space.)

Physics lecturer Stephen Irons, who assisted the group with the launch, said the balloon probably reached the upper stratosphere; while the GPS used to track the balloon could not send signals once the balloon went more than 20,000 feet in the air, its maximum altitude of between 15 and 19 miles in the air was estimated based on the balloon’s size specifications and helium content, and on Irons’ analysis of the photos taken.

Members of Design at Yale — an organization that is devoted to all types of design and creates logos, T-shirts and posters for campus organizations — said the idea for the balloon launch was inspired by a similar project Massachusetts Institute of Technology students performed this past September.

“I thought Design at Yale would be the perfect group for it, and it worked out,” said the group’s treasurer, Kyle Miller ’12.

Kim approached Irons to help with the project after physics class one day. Irons said he was impressed by the fact that “with their own equipment, [the students] actually proved the Earth is round.”

While the group got its ideal results, Irons and Miller said that the project was risky. Both said they had doubts, including whether the box would get caught in a tree or land in a lake and whether they would be able to find it. In addition, though the group hoped the balloon would land in an accessible spot based on computer simulations, there was no way to know whether the camera would work properly, Kim said.

“There were so many variables that could have gone wrong with this project,” he said. “Given that everything went well, it was great.”

The group plans to use the photos in an exhibition and in a journal featuring the project, said Fidel Gurrola ’12, co-president of Design at Yale, which has about 20 members.

The project, which cost $140, was funded by the Undergraduate Organizations Funding Committee.