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Nearly 20 miles above your head, where the sky turns black and the air starts to disappear, a balloon explodes – on purpose – as part of a research mission designed to study how systems behave in near-space environments where extreme cold, pressure and altitude push engineering to its limits.

A photograph of that mission, led by Sky Rueff, a mechanical engineering student in the College of Engineering and Computer Science, earned third place in the Art of Science.

“Those frames we captured changed everything. We had launched balloons before, but we’d never actually saw the moment of the burst,” said Rueff, president of FAU’s Aerospace Experimental Association, a group of future engineers with a vision of exploring space and advancing space technologies that conducted the mission.

Rueff’s image, titled Journey to Space, shows a rare view of a balloon bursting in the stratosphere. The cameras used were mounted to analyze the balloon’s behavior and how it interacts with high altitudes, but Rueff said he was surprised they also revealed the aesthetic power of engineering.

“Good engineering is an art,” he said. “There’s creativity in solving problems and beauty in seeing how a system behaves at the edge of what’s possible.”

Rueff’s research is grounded in real mission experience. He has helped lead multiple near-space launches and spent a summer in NASA’s University Nanosatellite Program learning systems engineering alongside Air Force and aerospace professionals. Now he’s helping train peers to design FAU’s next generation of satellite-ready hardware.

“Photography lets people feel the science,” said Rueff, adding images matter just as much as the data. “When you show the world from 100,000 feet, no borders, just Earth, it inspires curiosity. That’s what research and art have in common. They make people stop, look and wonder.”