Mystery documentary

General physics and astronomy discussions not directly related to Celestia
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Buzz
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Mystery documentary

Post #1by Buzz » 20.01.2007, 17:30

Does anybody happen to know what documentary this clip is from? I have known it for quite some time and keep wondering...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wskk3U1k-w

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t00fri
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Re: Mystery documentary

Post #2by t00fri » 20.01.2007, 18:37

Buzz wrote:Does anybody happen to know what documentary this clip is from? I have known it for quite some time and keep wondering...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wskk3U1k-w


Hey Chris,

That YouTube clip is precisely what I had in mind as a Celestia demo clip for your ESA conference in Noordwijk ;-)

You never showed us what you ACTUALLY did!?

Bye Fridger
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Cham M
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Post #3by Cham » 20.01.2007, 19:31

I like very much that video clip. Very Celestia like, with more eye candy. If only there was a better, larger version. This one is of very poor video quality.
"Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin", thought Alice; "but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life!"

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Post #4by Buzz » 20.01.2007, 21:22

Well, actually I have a better, larger version (13 MB mpeg) that I downloaded from somewhere years ago, and I cannot find out where it comes from! It is a bit different from the youtube version, as it travels the other way: from outside the Milky Way towards Earth, and it does not include the rather awful music. I could mail it to people who are interested and whose email allows the size.

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Cham M
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Post #5by Cham » 20.01.2007, 21:49

I may be interested, if you could split the zipped file in two (my mail box has a 10 MB capacity). However, I prefer the way from Earth to the galaxy.
"Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin", thought Alice; "but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life!"

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Re: Mystery documentary

Post #6by Adirondack » 22.01.2007, 10:47

t00fri wrote:That YouTube clip is precisely what I had in mind as a Celestia demo clip for your ESA conference in Noordwijk ;-)

You never showed us what you ACTUALLY did!?

Bye Fridger
I've seen what he actually did! :)
You can also see what he did! :lol: -> Click me!

Adirondack
We all live under the same sky, but we do not have the same horizon. (K. Adenauer)
The horizon of some people is a circle with the radius zero - and they call it their point of view. (A. Einstein)

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Re: Mystery documentary

Post #7by chris » 24.01.2007, 09:40

t00fri wrote:
Buzz wrote:Does anybody happen to know what documentary this clip is from? I have known it for quite some time and keep wondering...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wskk3U1k-w

Hey Chris,

That YouTube clip is precisely what I had in mind as a Celestia demo clip for your ESA conference in Noordwijk ;-)

You never showed us what you ACTUALLY did!?

Bye Fridger


I'll make the demo available soon . . . Since it was an astrodynamics audience, I focused on spacecraft visualization. The highlight was NEAR orbiting then touching down on the surface of Eros, followed by a slow zoom from the spacecraft out to galactic scale.

--Chris

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Re: Mystery documentary

Post #8by t00fri » 24.01.2007, 20:14

Adirondack wrote:
t00fri wrote:That YouTube clip is precisely what I had in mind as a Celestia demo clip for your ESA conference in Noordwijk ;-)

You never showed us what you ACTUALLY did!?

Bye Fridger
I've seen what he actually did! :)
You can also see what he did! :lol: -> Click me!

Adirondack


If I would not cite my co-authors of joint work about which I was asked to report at a scientific conference, they would never talk to me again...

Bye Fridger
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Adirondack M
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Re: Mystery documentary

Post #9by Adirondack » 25.01.2007, 16:00

t00fri wrote:If I would not cite my co-authors of joint work about which I was asked to report at a scientific conference, they would never talk to me again...
Bye Fridger
Chris did this verbally.

Adirondack
We all live under the same sky, but we do not have the same horizon. (K. Adenauer)

The horizon of some people is a circle with the radius zero - and they call it their point of view. (A. Einstein)

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Re: Mystery documentary

Post #10by t00fri » 25.01.2007, 17:55

Adirondack wrote:
t00fri wrote:If I would not cite my co-authors of joint work about which I was asked to report at a scientific conference, they would never talk to me again...
Bye Fridger
Chris did this verbally.

Adirondack

Thats no substitute.

(=> names/credits are lacking on all /copies/ of the slides that are typically drawn by /interested/ parties! Analogously, if the slides are published on/downloaded from some Web site...)

Chris wrote:I plan to add an 'acknowledgements' slide where
everyone can be mentioned.


Here is an arbitrary example of the first slide of a conference talk of mine. The credited collaborator is my ex-PhD student...

http://www.celestiaproject.net/~t00fri/images/ex.pdf

Bye Fridger
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Post #11by Eelco » 26.01.2007, 04:50

Hello Buzz,

I think it is part of the short film "Powers of Ten", rather well known I think, by a filmers-couple Charles and Ray Eames and based on a picture book with the same name from Philip and Phyllis Morrison. The film was shown here in Holland a few years back in one of the 'Zomergasten' television programmes of the VPRO, Dutch television, an interview with Dutch astrophysicist Vincent Icke. The 1977 film starts on a picknick blanket in Chicago, zooms out all the way to the edge of the known universe, and then back in again. It is a film from 1977 so for that time it was well made. Not everything is up to date of course, there was no Hubble telescope yet. There is also a video available of the interview from VPRO television but it is only available in Real, I could not check whether the link to the video still works, have not installed Real Mediaplayer. The whole page and interview is in Dutch I'm afraid: http://noorderlicht.vpro.nl/artikelen/19433462/

The videolink is under the text; 'Video, Bekijk het interview met Vincent Icke over het allergrootste', this opens a javascript window.

The idea for Powers of Ten was originally from another Dutchman, Kees Boeke, and his book was already published in 1957! This book, Cosmic View in the English tranlation can be viewed online, see also the link on the above page, http://www.vendian.org/mncharity/cosmicview/

It is largely still accurate today thinks Vincent Icke, the only thing that it really lacks today is a starting picture with the Higgs-boson and W- and Z-particles for instance, and on the other side Vincent Icke would like it to end with a picture of the afterglow of the Big Bang, the cosmic microwave background. Boeke wrote his book to educate his own four daughters, as a Quaker and convinced pacifist he refused to pay taxes because taxpayers money was also used for military expenditures. As a consequence he decided also not to make use of public transportation, mail and post-offices and the public schoolsystem. Together with his wife he made all the educational material himself including this book.

Buzz you're Dutch, you can read for yourself but I just translated a few things for the poor people who can't read a word of it!

Eelco

In the clip there is no narrative, so maybe it is a remake, the original fim has commentary by Philip Morrison. I did another Google search and there was a later shorter version of the film made by the Canadian Filmboard, without a narrative, maybe that is this one. It was called 'Cosmic Zoom'. I saw it mentioned on this page dedicated to Philip Morrison who died in 2005:
http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2005 ... -19152005/

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Post #12by Buzz » 27.01.2007, 22:55

Hi Eelco,

Thank you for your extensive post! But I'm afraid your suggestion is not correct. I had a look at the Powers of Ten again, and confirmed it is something else. The Powers or Ten is very nice; its simplicty is its strength: there are no camera movements, the camera just zooms out, while showing squares each one 10 times larger than the previous one. The search continues...

Buzz


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