China's FAST (Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope) can detect radio signals emitted tens of thousands of light-years away, and engineers have faced unprecedented challenges in constructing a giant radio receptor nestled amid mountains. From novel technological innovations to architectural challenges, we follow every step that gave birth to the biggest radio telescope ever constructed.
Self - Narrator (voice)
Documentary about the Griffith Observatory, shown at their Leonard Nimoy Event Horizon Theater
Since it explored Pluto in 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft has been zooming toward NASA's most distant target yet. Join the mission team as the probe attempts to fly by Ultima Thule, an object 4 billion miles from Earth.
A team of international scientists attempt to document the first-ever image of a black hole.
An incredible travel through space and time between the walls of the Paris Observatory, which is celebrating its 350th birthday. Place of discoveries such as speed of light or Neptune’s existence, it is still today one of the oldest operating observatories and the greatest hub in the world for astronomy and astrophysics researches, second only to Harvard.
This feature-length documentary is a portrait of eclipse chasers, people for whom solar eclipses - among nature's more spectacular phenomena – are a veritable obsession. The film follows 4 of them as they travel incredible distances to witness the last total eclipse of the millennium as it sweeps eastward across Europe to India. At various points along the way enthusiasts Alain Cirou in France, Paul Houde in Austria, Olivier Staiger in Germany and Debasis Sarkar in India offer their impressions of the historic event.
Chaco Canyon, located in northwest New Mexico, is perhaps the only site in the world constructed in an elaborate pattern that mirrors the yearly cycle of the sun and the 19-year cycle of the moon. How did an ancient civilization, with no known written language, arrange its buildings into a virtual celestial calendar, spanning an area roughly the size of Ireland?
Cave paintings and lunar calendars exist in the caves and remains of prehistoric hunters studied recently. What if Prehistoric Man were clever enough to develop in depth scientific knowledge? As unlikely as it may seem, new data tend to prove that Prehistoric Man actually invented Astronomy!
Billions of years ago, Venus may have harbored life-giving habitats similar to those on the early Earth. Today, Earth's twin is a planet knocked upside down and turned inside out. Its burned-out surface is a global fossil of volcanic destruction, shrouded in a dense, toxic atmosphere. Scientists are now unveiling daring new strategies to search for clues from a time when the planet was alive.
In Chile's Atacama Desert, astronomers peer deep into the cosmos in search for answers concerning the origins of life. Nearby, a group of women sift through the sand searching for body parts of loved ones, dumped unceremoniously by Pinochet's regime.
Photo sequence of the rare transit of Venus over the face of the Sun, one of the first chronophotographic sequences. In 1873, P.J.C. Janssen, or Pierre Jules César Janssen, invented the Photographic Revolver, which captured a series of images in a row. The device, automatic, produced images in a row without human intervention, being used to serve as photographic evidence of the passage of Venus before the Sun, in 1874.
At the edge of our solar system supposedly lies an immense planet. Five to ten times the size of the Earth. Several international teams of scientists have been competing in a frantic race to detect it, in uncharted territories, far beyond Neptune. The recent discovery of several dwarf planets, with intriguing trajectories, have put astronomers on the trail of this mysterious planet. Why is this enigmatic planet so difficult to detect? What would a ninth planet teach us about our corner of the universe? Could it help us unlock some of the mysteries of our solar system?
The ancients hid the secrets of their incredible knowledge of astronomy in their temples and palaces, built to align with the sun, on the same day, all over the world. Revealing our species' obsession with the sun, across thousands of years and every continent, this is architectural magic on a cosmic scale.
The first feature from Alison McAlpine is a dialogue with the heavens—in this case, the heavens above the Andes and the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, where she alights on the desert- and mountain-dwelling astronomers, fishermen, miners, and cowboys who live their lives with reverence and awe for the skies.
A documentary chronicling the history of the telescope from the time of Galileo. Featuring interviews with leading scientists discussing Galileo's first use of the telescope to the latest discoveries in cosmology.
Armenian radio-engineer Arevik Sargsyan has struggled throughout her life to preserve ROT54, a giant telescope built by her uncle in the 1980s. But the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that ROT54 was left abandoned for 30 years. Now, Arevik is attempting to take control of the telescope and prove it still works.
Although the mountain volcano Mauna Kea last erupted around 4,000 years ago, it is still hot today, the center of a burning controversy over whether its summit should be used for astronomical observatories or preserved as a cultural landscape sacred to the Hawaiian people. For five years the documentary production team Nā Maka o ka 'Āina ("the eyes of the land") captured on video the seasonal moods of Mauna Kea's unique 14,000-foot summit, the richly varied ecosystems that extend from sea level to alpine zone, the legends and stories that reveal the mountain's geologic and cultural history, and the political turbulence surrounding the efforts to protect the most significant temple in the islands: the mountain itself.
Following engineers and scientists on a groundbreaking mission as they build, test and launch the James Webb Space Telescope, the most powerful observatory ever constructed, and discovers the astonishing cosmological mysteries it will investigate.
A history of the telescope and a look at the James Webb telescope, and at the universe through the eyes of scientists and telescopes since the beginning.
It is the birth of neutrino astronomy. For the first time, astrophysicists can detect extra-terrestrial neutrinos in ice on the South Pole. The fundamental questions of science remain unanswered., how did the universe come to be? What keeps our world together? The newly discovered extra-galactic neutrinos may hold the keys to answering these questions.
Stunning slow-motion and timelapse cinematography of the landscapes, people and wildlife of the American South West.