astronomy

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

A Veritasium video on the asteroid threat, with UCLA's Dave Jewitt explaining detection efforts and how different asteroid sizes compare in damage.

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 short film in which friends build the first true-to-scale model of the solar system, with full planetary orbits, on a Nevada dry lakebed. It conveys the real distances and sizes involved.

Scott Manley's short animation shows every asteroid discovery from 1970 to 2015 plotted over time in 8K. It makes visible how survey technology made discoveries accelerate and where telescopes looked.

A time-lapse from ESO's Very Large Telescope showing stars orbiting the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way's center over nearly 20 years.

Explains the proposed NASA JPL plan to use the Sun as a gravitational lens, sending solar sail craft to its focal region to image an exoplanet's surface. It covers the distances involved, how imaging with the Sun would work and the mission design.

A very long, detailed look at the A4/V2 rocket turbopump, the steam-turbine-driven twin propellant pump system. It covers the peroxide and permanganate catalysis that drives the turbine. This is part 1 of a series on V2 components.