astro compass

Dave Jones of EEVblog tears down a Kollsman MD-1 Automatic Astro Compass, a mechanical analog computer from a B-52 bomber. It is part of a star-tracker inertial navigation system that computes altitude and azimuth.

Investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson explains how astroturf, fake grassroots campaigns funded by corporate or political interests, manipulates media messages. The TEDx talk is about 11 minutes.

A detailed 40-minute explanation of the ultraviolet catastrophe, covering Rayleigh and Jeans' classical treatment of blackbody radiation and Planck's quantum hypothesis. It follows the Eisberg and Resnick textbook treatment.

A two-minute clip from the documentary The Fog of War in which Robert McNamara recalls Fidel Castro explaining how close the world came to nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Brady Haran interviews Brother Guy Consolmagno, director of the Vatican Observatory, for Sixty Symbols. It is part of a three-video set along with the observatory's telescopes and its meteorite collection.

A 12-minute clip from Joe Rogan's podcast in which former NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman describes working for Elon Musk at SpaceX. He discusses Musk's engineering breadth, his Mars-focused decision making and the stress of the job.

Folk musician Peter Mulvey performs Vlad the Astrophysicist, a spoken-word style song that touches on why civilizations may never meet across space and time.

The Galaxy Song from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, a comic musical tour of the size and motion of the galaxy and our place in it.

A roughly 90-minute film of John Dobson building a Dobsonian telescope step by step, including hand-grinding the mirror.

Tim Dodd's hour-long deep dive on how rocket engines start, from solid motors to liquid engines. It covers thermal conditioning, spin-up, ignition methods, starting in space, and a step-by-step RS-25 startup.

A short video built around an animation of the roughly 10,000 galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, placed at their measured redshift distances. It gives a brief history of deep field images and ends with a 3D fly-through.

Cody's Lab builds a 200-billionth-scale model to show how far away the nearest stars are, using parallax and light speed. A short astronomy explainer on interstellar distances.

David Kipping presents his proposed Terrascope, a telescope that uses Earth's atmosphere as a lens to achieve enormous magnification. He covers the history of telescopes and his path to the idea, plus Sol-scope and Jupiter-scope variants.

A three-hour Joe Rogan podcast with Randall Carlson, builder and geomythologist, on catastrophic geological events, cosmic impacts and climate at the end of the last glacial period.

Commander Chris Hadfield performs a revised version of David Bowie's Space Oddity, recorded aboard the International Space Station. It was released as a music video in 2013.

Astrophysicist David Kipping presents the halo drive, a proposed way to propel a starship to a good fraction of light speed by gaining energy from a black hole. The video is based on his peer-reviewed paper and explains why energy is the main obstacle to interstellar flight.

Terence Tao's AMS Einstein Public Lecture at UCLA on the cosmic distance ladder, the chain of methods astronomers use to measure distances from the Earth to distant galaxies. It is aimed at a general audience.

Lex Fridman interviews Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb about the interstellar object Oumuamua, aliens and black holes. Loeb lays out his argument that it may be an artifact rather than debris.

A long conversation between Eric Weinstein and Daniel Schmachtenberger on whether humanity can flourish long term on a single planet, introducing the Game A versus Game B framing. It covers catastrophic risk and alternatives to rivalrous systems.

A two-minute clip of Elon Musk becoming emotional in an interview, reportedly about harsh criticism of SpaceX from astronauts.

Tim Dodd of Everyday Astronaut tours SpaceX's Starbase with Elon Musk as guide. They cover the high bay, grid fins, Raptor V2, the HLS lander and stage separation, and Musk explains his engineering management process.

Everyday Astronaut's Tim Dodd runs an hour-long, data-driven analysis of what rockets actually emit and how that compares with airliners and other industries. It breaks down exhaust by propellant type, per-passenger and total emissions, and ways launches could be cleaner.

Everyday Astronaut explains the basic physics of rocket engines, the main engine cycles and fuel types, then compares SpaceX's methane-fueled full-flow staged combustion Raptor to other engines. It runs nearly 50 minutes with chapter markers.

Everyday Astronaut takes a tour of SpaceX's Starbase with Elon Musk as guide. Topics include the Raptor engines, launch escape systems, the heat shield and the first orbital test.

Everyday Astronaut's guide to visiting Starbase, Texas to see Starship, covering what and where it is, which areas close during launches, where to watch from, where to fly into and stay, and things to do.

Tim Dodd of Everyday Astronaut talks with Elon Musk right after Musk's 2019 Starship presentation. Musk discusses Starship's design, why SpaceX favors conventional engines over aerospikes, and how deleting parts and processes speeds up development.

Tim Dodd of Everyday Astronaut gets a close-up walkthrough of SpaceX's Raptor 2 engine from Elon Musk at Starbase. They cover how Raptor 2 was simplified and upgraded relative to Raptor 1, including cooling and thrust vectoring details.

PBS Space Time explains the proposal to use the Sun's gravity as a giant lens, sending a train of small light-sail spacecraft to the focal point roughly 550 AU out. It covers how such a telescope could image exoplanets in surprising detail and the engineering challenges involved.

A visual scale comparison of stars and cosmic objects, from planets up to some of the largest known stars, set to music. It is meant to convey the vastness of the universe.

A short clip from Carl Sagan's Cosmos in which he explains how Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the Earth using shadows in two Egyptian cities. It is a clear, visual account of an ancient scientific feat.

A timelapse compilation of the night sky above the Very Large Telescope at Paranal, Chile, using ESO photographers' footage set to music. It shows the stars wheeling overhead and the observatory at work.

PBS Space Time explains the Hubble constant tension, in which two precise, independent methods of measuring the universe's expansion rate disagree. It covers why this calls some standard cosmology into question.

PBS Space Time explains Stephen Hawking's prediction of Hawking radiation and how black holes can emit radiation and slowly evaporate. It goes beyond the common particle-antiparticle analogy.

PBS Space Time examines the interstellar object 'Oumuamua and the popular theories about it, including the light-sail hypothesis. It argues that a natural rock is the likeliest explanation.

The American Museum of Natural History's film flies from the Himalayas out through the atmosphere and solar system to the afterglow of the Big Bang, using its Digital Universe Atlas four-dimensional map.

Angela Collier, a physicist, revisits her earlier dark matter video, explaining dark matter as a set of observations rather than a theory and discussing MOND comments.

Terence Tao and Grant Sanderson of 3Blue1Brown walk through the cosmic distance ladder, showing how humans measured distances from the Earth to the Moon, Sun, planets and beyond. It includes animations and the history behind each step.

Kurzgesagt introduces the Fermi paradox: with so many stars and planets, why do we see no sign of aliens? It sets up the question and what it might imply for our own future. It is part 1 of 2.

Sabine Hossenfelder explains how her opinion on dark matter has shifted, weighing the evidence for and against it and the case for modified gravity. It runs through what dark matter is and why it has not been detected.

Kurzgesagt explains black hole stars, a hypothesized kind of giant star with a black hole at its core that could be a route to early supermassive black holes.