We travelled to Fort Laramie, Wyoming to carry out the launch. Our craft carried six precisely aligned cameras which were carefully synced using a bespoke timing control mechanism, to allow us capture a 360° perspective. The flight had to be meticulously timed so that the apex of the flight coincided with the eclipse’s moment of totality.

Once the eclipse had been captured and our craft recovered, all footage had to be stitched together manually frame by frame. While this is now made significantly easier due to advances in camera and video production technology, this then-cutting-edge approach took almost 400 hours of editing time to produce the final video.

In addition to the stunning visuals captured of the eclipse, shared on BBC Earth’s YouTube channel, our flight data made a significant contribution to research into stratospheric gravity waves conducted by the Montana Space Grant Consortium.