March 24, 2015
Your birthday marks the moment a small planet circling a modest star gained another witness to its wonders.
Powers of Ten
Birthday · March 24, 2015
A little universe, just for you
Your date.
Ready to give.
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APOD published March 24, 2015 · Video still. Credit: Charles & Ray Eames (Eames Office). A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
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 embedded above. Please click the above arrow to see the nine minute movie for yourself. From a picnic blanket near Chicago out past the Virgo 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 movie Contact, and in a short digital video called The Known Universe created in 2010 for the American Museum of Natural History. Ray and husband Charles Eames, the film's creators, were known as quite visionary spirits and even invented their own popular chair.
Image credit: Charles & Ray Eames (Eames Office)