Saturday, April 14, 2007

Wonderful Hubble Video

At tonight's meeting of the Aldrich Astronomical Society, we watched a wonderful ESA video called "Hubble: 15 Years of Discovery." It was downloaded in segments by one of our members and I think the total time was about one hour. The graphics and explanations are really fantastic, and it doesn't assume you are an astronomy expert. In fact it's an excellent introduction to the current facts and issues of astronomy, many of which are current facts and issues thanks to the images and data returned by HST.

The nine segments of this video are available on YouTube (chapter 1 is here, and you can find links to the other chapters on the same page), and that would obviously be the quickest way to see them. But to really appreciate the quality of the graphics in this documentary, I'd suggest downloading the MP4 files from this page. These are big files (we watched the H.264 MPEG-4 versions on a video projector and the quality was excellent, total of 1.3 GB) but worth it if you have the bandwidth and disc space for them. There's also a DVD available here.

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