The Universe

The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang. Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world's most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History.

The universe is fascinating. It's sheer scale makes it's almost impossible to comprehend. Back when I completed my teaching certification, I used to show this video to students at various times - there's no better way to blow their minds to the 'massiveness' of it all.

DaringFireball linked to the video below yesterday. It's 45 minutes long so not as easy to view as the one above but fascinating - a real-time view of how light moves from the sun out into the universe. Wow.

Getting sucked into the minutiae of life can be easy but keeping perspective in the grand scheme of things, we're a blip on a blip!

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. I've taken liberties 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 I've kept the size and distances of all the objects as accurate as possible. I also decided to end the animation just past Jupiter as I wanted to keep the running length below an hour. Design & Animation: Alphonse Swinehart / http://aswinehart.com Music: Steve Reich "Music for 18 Musicians" Performed by: Eighth Blackbird / http://www.eighthblackbird.org