Tuesday, January 12, 2010

The Known Universe

This video, The Known Universe by the American Museum of Natural History, was shown to me by Hal and it's just beautiful.  It reminds me of the short film from the 70s, Powers of Ten.

Okay, I do have to mention a point or two that bother me.  The main one is that the presentation jumps almost immediately and too quickly from the Milky Way to All galaxies we've mapped.  It doesn't really represent our Local Group which includes, along with our Milky Way, two other grand spirals, the Andromeda Galaxy and M33, and then the other dwarf galaxies.  Similarly, it doesn't call attention to our local super cluster or the other nearby super clusters.

For one of the most distant surveys, the data are limited to the wedges shown here (mostly because of the dust in the plane of the Milky Way itself.  But there are more deep surveys that go farther than the edge of the Milky way, i.e., the picture is filled in much better than that.

But, with those points aside, the film is still extremely well done and a nice planetarium show in a video.