Created on Saturday, 31 July 2010 16:42

Created on Saturday, 31 July 2010 14:53

400 Years of the Telescope takes viewers on a journey from Galileo’s first look at the cosmos in 1609, to today’s thrilling quests to discover new worlds and glimpse the formation of the first stars after the Big Bang.

The filmmakers traveled the globe, interviewing leading astronomers and cosmologists against a backdrop of the world’s greatest observatories, to create a vivid film that presents the human quest of the past 400 years to understand the structure and nature of the universe.

Created on Saturday, 31 July 2010 15:20

On a crystal-clear evening, on vacation perhaps, how often do we contemplate the night sky and promise to learn the stars and constellations? Somehow we never get round to it. Charts in newspapers look too complicated. Astronomical handbooks are equally daunting.

'Stargazing: A Graphic Guide To The Universe' is the answer – the night sky simply and beautifully mapped, an animated stellar atlas that works from anywhere on Earth. Season-by-season, it signposts and explains. Little by little – like learning a language – the cosmos is comprehensible.

Animated vignettes turn points of light – stars, nebulae, galaxies – into supernovae, flashing pulsars, searing quasars and rotating swarms of 150-billion stars with super-massive black holes at their centers.

The sky is viewed from three latitude bands – from the mid-latitudes of the northern hemisphere (Japan, Europe, North America), from the tropics, and from the mid-latitudes of the southern hemisphere (Australasia and southern South America).

Created on Saturday, 31 July 2010 16:24

This short video contains high-resolution visualizations of black holes and other cosmic phenomena based on data generated by telescope observations and ultra-high end computer simulations.

Immersive animations portray the formation of the early universe, star birth and death, the collision of giant galaxies and a simulated flight to a super-massive black hole lurking at the center of our own Milky Way Galaxy.