Svalbard is a norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean where the world's northernmost city is situated. It is a place where the underground, terrestrial and spatial universes blend into each other starting from a coal mine up to Venus.
This film tells the surprising story of how the Allegheny Observatory has been a world leader in the study of the stars since the 1860s. Self-educated, and often facing unrelenting hardships, the people associated with the Allegheny Observatory defied the odds to make enormous contributions to the founding of astrophysics and early aviation.
The special examines the motives behind and analysis of the shocking attacks that took place Friday in Oslo and on the nearby island of Utoya. Anders Behring Breivik, a 32-year-old Norwegian, is accused of perpetrating the twin attacks, in which 76 people died.
A team of international scientists attempt to document the first-ever image of a black hole.
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.
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?
Three Frenchmen go out on their first polar expedition to the largest polar desert in the world. Sarek, in the north of Sweden.
To celebrate its 50th anniversary year, ESO in 2012 released the documentary Europe to the Stars — ESO's first 50 years of Exploring the Southern Sky. The movie tells the story of ESO — what scientific discoveries it has been making and how it designs, builds and operates some of the most powerful ground-based telescopes.
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.
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.
Nikolai and Vegard were childhood friends who spent their free time on the ski slopes. Now, Nikolai has become a professional skier, while Vegard lives in caves and trains obsessively to complete a perilous and physically demanding ski tour. This is a story about friendship and setting ambitious goals.
Jocelyn Bell was a graduate student at Cambridge in 1967 when she pushed through the skepticism from her superiors to make one of the greatest astrophysical discoveries of the twentieth century. While Jocelyn was belittled and sexually harassed by the media, the Nobel Prize was awarded to her professor and his boss.
Shot mainly using spy cameras, this film gets closer than ever before to the world's greatest land predator. As the film captures its intimate portrait of polar bears' lives, it reveals how their intelligence and curiosity help them cope in a world of shrinking ice.
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.
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?
To understand firsthand what the United States of America can learn from other nations, Michael Moore playfully “invades” some to see what they have to offer.
A mining operation in Cerrejon, Northern Colombia revealed a treasure trove of fossils from animals that lived ten million years after the KT extinction that killed the dinosaurs. Surprisingly, enormous reptiles were dominate. Scientists investigate who was the apex predator of the era - Titanoboa, a quarter ton giant snake five times bigger than the largest anaconda, or a similarly giant crocodilian with an incredibly deadly bite force. —David Foss
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.
With Olin's 85-year-old father as guide, we experience Norway's most adventurous valley, Oldedalen in Nordfjord. He grew up here, and here generations before him have lived in balance with nature.
In our terrestrial view of things, the speed of light seems incredibly fast. But as soon as you view it against the vast distances of the universe, it's unfortunately very slow. This animation illustrates, in realtime, the journey of a photon of light emitted from the surface of the sun and traveling across a portion of the solar system, from a human perspective. Liberties were taken with certain things like the alignment of planets and asteroids, as well as ignoring the laws of relativity concerning what a photon actually "sees" or how time is experienced at the speed of light, but overall the size and distances of all the objects were kept as accurate as possible. It was also decided to end the animation just past Jupiter to keep the running length below an hour.