Astronomy Movies
The following movies are in a miscellany of formats.
The ones listed I have a local copy of, but they are only a subset
of those available at the official sites.
- From Sandia Labs:
simulations of an asteroid taking out New York City in a grazing impact.
- aster_vr1.qt 890 kB
- aster_vr2.qt 768 kB
- asteroid-nyc.qt 804 kB
- From JPL's video archive:
- castalia.mpg 87kB
asteroid Castalia computer model rotation made from Cassini imaging data.
- tout2.mpg 288kB
asteroid Toutatis computer model rotation made from Cassini imaging data.
- marsface.mpg 70kB
flying around the (low-res) "Face On Mars." I wonder if a similar
movie can be found with the new Mars Observer high-res images?
- cstrjct2.mpg 1314kB trajectory of
Cassini spacecraft from earth to Saturn. Feels like you are flying
through the solar system.
- From Space Telescope Science Institute:
- merger2.mov 5498kB Simulated
Elliptical-Spiral merger made to look
like Cass A. XANIM cannot play this .mov format movie.
- Mars.mpg 775kB Mars globe rotation -
made with real HST images.
- HDF.mpg 1899kB Hubble Deep Field - big
zoom from the Big Dipper as seen from your back yard to the location of
the Hubble Deep Field, the "deepest," most detailed picture ever
taken of any spot in
the sky.
- galaxies.mpg 2379kB Galaxy
Formation. Standard N-body cosmology simulation. As the universe expands,
the densest clumps attract each other by mutual gravity and collapse
messily to form, eventually, galaxies as we know them.
- m32anim.mpg 4756kB Zoom in to a
suspected black hole in M32. I notice that the orientation
of M32 relative to the nucleus of the Andromeda galaxy as shown is wrong:
M32 is south and a little bit east of Andromeda, so it should be down and
a little to the left. Why isn't it? Because van der Marel didn't bother
to get it right.
- Rings.mpg 1303kB Light from supernova
1987A has illuminated "rings" of material left over from episodes of
mass loss when it was still a star. This movie starts with an HST image
of the "rings,"
dissolves to an animation showing the 3-dimensional geometry, then
dissolves back to the HST image.
- From U. Oregon: Introduction to The Andromeda Galaxy.
- NASA: Peekskill fireball. Quicktime format.
Last modified: Fri Dec 17 14:19:59 CST 1999