Film & Animation

Cassini’s Grand Finale at Saturn

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Cassini’s Grand Finale at Saturn – Bonnie Meinke, Space Telescope Science Institute

Since 2004, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has been orbiting Saturn making amazing discoveries about the planet’s swirling storms, menagerie of moons, and radical ring system. The Cassini mission recently ended on September 15, 2017 when the spacecraft dove into the cloud tops of Saturn; leaving behind a wake of scientists’ tears and hopeful predictions for the future of planetary science. Many of the lessons of Saturn can be applied elsewhere in our solar system and to worlds around other stars, including giant planet weather patterns, moon construction, and potential habitable environments. Dr. Meinke will strive to condense this historic 13 year voyage into 45 minutes as she celebrates the highlights of a mission that changed our understanding of the solar system.

Host: Dr. Frank Summers

Recorded live on October 3, 2017 at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, MD, USA

For more information: http://hubblesite.org/about_us/public-talks.shtml

A Flight Through the CANDELS Ultra Deep Survey Field [Ultra HD]

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This visualization traverses the CANDELS Ultra Deep Survey (UDS) field to showcase the varied appearances of galaxies and their three-dimensional distribution. The sequence features a dense cluster of galaxies about 6 billion light-years away and extends to galaxies at more than twice that distance. Because the light from these galaxies has travelled for billions of years across space, the images show the galaxies as they appeared billions of years ago. In addition, the expansion of space has redshifted the light of these galaxies toward longer wavelengths (i.e., to the red end of the visible-light region and into the infrared-light region). The changes seen in galaxies during the fly-through illustrate the changes in galaxy structure and appearance over billions of years of cosmic history.

CANDELS is an acronym for the Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey project. One of the largest projects ever done with the Hubble Space Telescope, CANDELS surveyed five fields to study the development of galaxies over time. The CANDELS observations of the UDS field complement ground-based observations from the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope.

Astronomers and visual artists extracted over 26,000 galaxies from the Hubble UDS images and created a computer model based on the measured and estimated properties. Note that the distances used in the visualization are significantly compressed for cinematic purposes.

Credits: NASA, ESA, F. Summers, J. DePasquale, G. Bacon, and Z. Levay (STScI)

Acknowledgement: H. Ferguson, A. Koekemoer, and the CANDELS Team

Music: “Rotisserie Graveyard” by Doctor Turtle CC BY 4.0

Download movie files at: http://hubblesite.org/video/984/science

Tonight’s Sky: October 2017

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In October, the northern hemisphere is treated to a view of Pegasus, Andromeda, and the Orionid Meteor Shower.

“Tonight’s Sky” is produced by HubbleSite.org, online home of the Hubble Space Telescope. This is a recurring show, and you can find more episodes—and other astronomy videos—at http://hubblesite.org/videos/science