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Open Culture has put together a list of its top 125 science videos. These range from full science lectures, to documentaries, to the short time-lapse videos I like so much.
Here’s one of my new favorites: Earth-rise as seen from the moon, taken by the Japanese Kaguya spacecraft.
Here are a series of black & white images taken by the Cassini-Huygens Imaging Science Subsystem (iow the “camera” aboard the Cassini probe) as it orbits Saturn. Chris Abbas has strung the images together into a pseudo-animation and set the whole thing to a soft Nine Inch Nails score. The result is breathtaking.
CASSINI MISSION from Chris Abbas on Vimeo.
(via Open Culture)
Nick Risinger has been traveling North and South America and snapping picture of the night sky as he goes. He fused these images – 37,440 exposures – into a single Panoramic Sky Survey. You can view the Milky Way as if you were standing in space and this inconvenient planet weren’t underneath you.
You can also read Risinger’s story and some of the technical aspect of his accomplishment at his website Photopic Sky Survey.
The Australian branch of the Gemini Observatory held a contest for Australian high school students, in which teams selected objects for the Observatory to photograph. The winning entry would be both scientifically important and stunningly gorgeous.
I think they succeeded.
(The obligatory whopping huge .tif is available on the Gemini site.)
The winning team came from Sydney Girls High School Astronomy Club in central Sydney. They suggested that the Observatory photograph these two galaxies; NGC 6872 (larger, left) and IC 4970 (smaller, right). The team pointed out that these two galaxies are locked in a dance that “…will also serve to illustrate the situation faced by the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy in millions of years.
But probably their more poignant comment has to do with the change in perspective that can come from viewing such images.
When viewers consider this image “in contrast to their daily life,” the team explained, “there is a significant possibility of a new awareness or perception of the age and scale of the universe, and their part in it.”
Somewhere deep in space, something larger that you can possibly imagine is colliding with something much, much larger than that, and the whole thing takes place in a scale of time that dwarfs the entire span of human history. And it is beautiful.
Congratulations to the Sydney Girls High School Astronomy Club, who seem to be an incredibly cool group of students.
From NASA:
When a rather large M 3.6 class flare occurred near the edge of the Sun on Feb. 24, 2011, it blew out a gorgeous, waving mass of erupting plasma that swirled and twisted for 90 minutes. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured the event in extreme ultraviolet light. Because SDO images are high definition, the team was able to zoom in on the flare and still see exquisite details. And using a cadence of a frame taken every 24 seconds, the sense of motion is, by all appearances, seamless.
The original video is 16sec long. This version is from Space.com, who added the loop and background music.
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