Today I had the opportunity to watch the Nebraska Balloon Club launch 6 balloons from Lake Zorinsky.

They launched at sunrise, so a lot of these pictures were taken before the sun came up and then retouched once I got home.

On the right, you can see a pilot testing a burner before he gets everything else out of the trailer.

On the left, unloading the trailer (in the dark).

Balloons are BIG!  You really don't think about how big they are until the flat balloon is spread out over a huge area of the park.

The little cables that connect the basket to the balloon itself are pretty.... thin.  I get I would have hoped that they would be more substantial!

They launched 6 balloons this morning.  Some of them had paying customers, and some of them were just guys having fun on a Saturday morning.  Those guys were going to be playing a game of  "fox and hare", where one balloonist would fly out ahead and then the other ones would try to keep up with him.  None of this is easy, since you can't really steer a balloon all that much!

I've never thought about what the underside of the basket looks like before today, despite the fact that this is the part of the basket that you NORMALLY see.

By the way, notice that this basket is triangular.  All of the other baskets were square.  This pilot explained to me the wonderful advantages of triangular baskets, but I have to admit that I've already forgotten all of that stuff.

The "cold inflation" of a balloon.  And "cold" is the right word.  I had a thermometer with me (naturally), and the temperature was 42 degrees.

Here one of the crews is starting to heat the air in the balloon.  I was SHOCKED by how fast this goes--once they start heating the balloon, the balloon is upright in about 10 seconds.

The "mouth" of the balloon is MUCH bigger than I would have thought.  Also, I would have guessed that the fan would sit much closer to the mouth, but it's surprisingly far away.

Like I said in on a previous picture, once the crew starts heating the air inside the balloon, the balloon pops up really fast.  It was really hard to catch a picture of that happening, because it only takes a couple of seconds.

This is the first launch of the day.  This balloon will be the "hare" in the "fox and hare" game.