APOD: 2011 February 1 - Powers of Ten (original) (raw)

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Discover the cosmos!Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

2011 February 1

Powers of Ten
Credit & Copyright: Charles & Ray Eames (Eames Office)

Explanation: How different does the universe look on small, medium, and large scales? The most famous short science film of its generation gives breathtaking comparisons. That film, Powers of Ten, originally created in the 1960s, has now been officially posted to YouTube and embeddedabove. Please click the above arrow to see the nine minute movie for yourself. From a picnic blanketnear Chicago out past theVirgo Cluster of Galaxies, every ten seconds the film zooms out to show a square a factor of ten times larger on each side. The video then reverses, zooming back in a factor of ten every two seconds and ends up inside a single proton. The Powers of Ten sequence is actually based on the book Cosmic View by Kees Boeke in 1957, as is a similar but mostly animated film Cosmic Zoom that was also created in the late 1960s. The changing perspectives are so enthralling and educational that sections have been recreated using more modern computerized techniques, including the first few minutes of the movieContact, and in a short digital video called The Known Universe created last year for the American Museum of Natural History.Ray and husband Charles Eames, the film's creators, were known as quite visionary spirits and even inventedtheir own popular chair.

Tomorrow's picture: open space

Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff(MTU) &Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)
NASA Official: Phillip NewmanSpecific rights apply.
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