cosmic zoom

A Mandelbrot set zoom animation reaching a magnification of about 2.1x10^275, claimed as the deepest at the time (January 2010). Each frame was rendered separately over six months on 12 CPU cores.

Footage shot with a Nikon P1000 superzoom camera showing extreme optical zoom on distant targets from Ben Lomond in Scotland.

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.

Veritasium explains how cosmic rays and other particles flip bits in computer memory, with examples including a Belgian election count error, plane incidents and game glitches. It is inspired by a RadioLab episode on bit flips.

The Eames Office's 1977 film Powers of Ten starts at a picnic in Chicago and zooms out by a factor of ten every ten seconds to the edge of the universe. It then zooms inward to a proton in a carbon atom.

A short Stanford video in which Chao-Lin Kuo surprises Professor Andrei Linde with BICEP2 evidence supporting cosmic inflation, the first apparent images of primordial gravitational waves.

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 one-minute scene from the film Enemy of the State showing absurdly implausible image enhancement, with freezing, rotating, zooming and focusing on a video.

A one-minute clip from a CSI episode featuring the trope of zooming and enhancing low-resolution images. The uploader says it was the last CSI episode they watched.

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.

Kurzgesagt explains why, even with science-fiction technology, most of the universe is permanently out of reach because of cosmic expansion and finite resources.

Carl Sagan's narration of the Pale Blue Dot passage, reflecting on the Voyager photograph of Earth as a tiny speck in space. It is a short meditation on humanity's smallness and shared home.

CGP Grey explains the elegant ratio of A4 and the metric paper sizes, then zooms out across scales from the Planck length to the observable universe.

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.

A Kurzgesagt animation on supernovae, the most powerful explosions in the universe. It explains their role in creating elements and what would happen to Earth if one occurred nearby.

Lawrence Krauss's 2009 talk on the current picture of the universe, how it will end and how it could have come from nothing. It covers the expanding universe, cosmic background radiation and the cosmological constant.

A two-minute video of Conway's Game of Life running inside Conway's Game of Life, built from OTCA metapixels and Golly. It zooms smoothly between scales.

A 2007 Channel 4 documentary by Martin Durkin arguing that human-caused global warming is overstated or a scam. It features contrarian scientists such as Richard Lindzen and promotes sunspot and cosmic-ray explanations for temperature change. Its claims are rejected by mainstream climate science.

Rational Animations explains Robin Hanson's grabby aliens model, which argues that humanity looks suspiciously early in cosmic history. Expanding civilizations set a deadline that explains our timing and bears on the Fermi paradox.

Astrophysicist Dr. Becky explains the Hubble tension, the disagreement between expansion-rate measurements from the cosmic microwave background and the distance ladder, and what early JWST Cepheid observations add.

A short Nature video on the discovery that our home supercluster is Laniakea, redefined by mapping the flow of galaxies rather than their density. It names the structure with a Hawaiian word meaning 'immeasurable heaven'.

A Kurzgesagt video exploring how advanced civilizations might wage war across light years. It looks at weapons such as relativistic beams and what they would do.

A short compilation of the gesture and multitouch interface scenes from the film Minority Report.

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.

The Blade Runner scene in which Deckard uses a voice-controlled machine to enhance a photograph, zooming into hidden details.