Brilliant indeed! A 19-year-old British student Adam Cudworth was able to capture some amazing shots of our planet through a camera he bought on eBay. Yup, no mistake there. Apparently, what NASA can do, this teenager can too! He attached the camera on a balloon and launched it 20 miles into the sky. What else was attached to the balloon? A Canon A570 camera in an insulated box with a GPS tracker used to track the device when it fell back on the ground. He found it 30 miles away from his house.

The best part: this whole experiment only costs $600!

* More on Adam Cudworth's Flickr page.