Time Lapse Video From Hubble

September 1, 2011 11:54 AM

Incredible, stunning, beautiful and humbling. Time lapse videos from Hubble.
posted by pashdown (33 comments total)

Wow. Space is so big you need a time lapse of 10 years to see a massive explosion even moving.
posted by DU at 11:56 AM on September 1, 2011

Many of these look more like panning than moving.
posted by rocket88 at 12:01 PM on September 1, 2011

On Gizmodo! Surely this is too "nerdy" for them to like...
posted by Lutoslawski at 12:02 PM on September 1, 2011

(seriously though, these are amazing)
posted by Lutoslawski at 12:05 PM on September 1, 2011

For those not to keen on gawker media, here is the NASA site. One of the scientists has his own site with additional movies, which I saw here.
posted by a robot made out of meat at 12:05 PM on September 1, 2011 [9 favorites]

Thanks for the other links. I went to the Hubble site and sort of ran into a dead-end with no video. The "additional movies" site has some awesome stuff.
posted by pashdown at 12:07 PM on September 1, 2011

Jaw Dropping....
posted by lumpenprole at 12:07 PM on September 1, 2011

On the one hand there's the wonder of watching cosmic phenomena unfold, wishing I could live to be 1000 to see how the action plays out.

On the other, a couple of these look like planet eating monsters sweeping forward to engulf whatever is in their path. I hope the old ones don't notice us.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 12:11 PM on September 1, 2011

The song in the video is Staralfur

Of course it is.
posted by griphus at 12:13 PM on September 1, 2011 [2 favorites]

which I saw here.

And which I saw here. I love my SciGuy.
posted by PapaLobo at 12:14 PM on September 1, 2011

The civility of the comments was also worth noting
posted by Cranberry at 12:17 PM on September 1, 2011

I saw this a few minutes after watching Truffaut's Small Change. Talk about perspective. This has been a notable September 1st.
posted by jwhite1979 at 12:23 PM on September 1, 2011

Wow, for some reason these reminded me of seeing my babies in the womb on the high-res ultrasound monitor - both the sudden, disjointed moves and the slow, watery ones, all weirdly lit against the black background.

Which spurred all sorts of Deep Thoughts about wow, stars and galaxies being born looks just like babies about to be born, and it's all part of the mystical circle of life, and if that were a baby it would be, like, an actual God, and omg a baby God is about to be born, the universe is about to implode! and maybe that's what they mean when they say we're all children of God, and then I shook my head and thought it really is time to stop wasting time on MetaFilter and get back to work.

Trippy.
posted by widdershins at 12:26 PM on September 1, 2011 [2 favorites]

If you like this, you'll love Hubble 3D IMAX. Really, really amazing look inside some of those clouds.
posted by MrMoonPie at 12:27 PM on September 1, 2011

>> Space is so big you need a time lapse of 10 years to see a massive explosion even moving.

And just to add to the sense of immensity, the scale on those 'additional movies' is in AU, which is the distance from the earth to the sun: ~93M miles. If my math is right, that makes 1000AU work out to ~1/64 of a light year. Yowza!
posted by JohnFredra at 12:28 PM on September 1, 2011

Foolish ancestors! You could have started recording this thousands of years ago so I could get to see a little more of this beautiful shit.


even if it is a little false-coloured
posted by vanar sena at 12:34 PM on September 1, 2011

Hm. Some things sort of moving a little. Guess I've seen too many sci-fi movies to have my jaw dropped.
posted by notmydesk at 12:45 PM on September 1, 2011

Impressive. Someone needs to do 14 years time lapse on a street corner in New York.
posted by Rashomon at 12:47 PM on September 1, 2011

It reminds me of the seething desire and jealousy I had when reading about Saunt Tancred's Nebulae in Anathem - in the book a monk sees the beginning of a supernova and points his telescope at it, the telescope records a frame every clear night for the next 2500 years, and by the time of the events of the book people can watch the movie.
posted by dirtdirt at 12:52 PM on September 1, 2011 [1 favorite]

Some of them were pretty cool... But many of them simply have very little internal movement, so it might as well be panning across a still photo (as I just realized rocket88 mentioned in the second comment). The thing that struck me, though, was noticing the YEARS going by in the bottom of the screen. I only noticed that at about the 4th or 5th scene.
posted by antifuse at 12:55 PM on September 1, 2011

Sorry universe, Michael Bay is not impressed by your demo reel. You do remember the way out?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 1:03 PM on September 1, 2011 [1 favorite]

Really amazing when you think of the fact that you are looking at changes stretched out over years and hundreds of millions of miles, from a perspective billions of miles away. We are so incredibly small.

At first glance I thought I was looking at jets from active black holes, but then realised they were Herbig-Haro objects!
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 1:06 PM on September 1, 2011 [1 favorite]

(Don't worry, universe, the next Terrence Malick movie will just be you on loop.)
posted by griphus at 1:06 PM on September 1, 2011

Call your congresscritter and urge them to support the James Webb Space Telescope! It's alllllmost done and, if the funding cuts go through, we'll have no significant space-based astronomy platform when Hubble finally dies in 3-10 years.

(Yes, the JWST project was a cock-up and ran way over budget, but canning it now when it's nearly done would be more expensive than starting over with a properly-run project. Clean the managerial house and finish the thing up. It'll make many of the images from Hubble look like back-yard telescope work!)
posted by introp at 1:17 PM on September 1, 2011 [5 favorites]

blau noct-eh
eh ne neh
blau noct-eh nyeh

*abruptly cut off*
posted by nathancaswell at 1:24 PM on September 1, 2011

Reminds me of the child wish I had of getting inside Black Hole's Maximilian and seeing all that stuff from up close. Incredibly cool (or probably: hot)
posted by stFire at 1:26 PM on September 1, 2011

I don't know why, but on a rather awful day that has been a part of a particularly awful year, this video made me feel just a little better.

Granted, maybe it was just me thinking of Bill Murray.
posted by Muddler at 1:47 PM on September 1, 2011 [1 favorite]

If you're confusing these for a panned image you're not looking closely enough.

Most of them are very impressive. But there's a couple in there that just aren't that good, and I wonder why they were included.
posted by antifuse at 1:54 PM on September 1, 2011

Watching the movies go into reverse makes it look like breathing: Exhale. Inhale. Expire. Inspire.
posted by jiawen at 2:07 PM on September 1, 2011

My god, it's full of stars.
posted by neuromodulator at 2:51 PM on September 1, 2011

Incredible, stunning, beautiful and humbling.

Never have understood where the "humbling" part comes from. Things like this just make me feel glorious.
posted by carping demon at 3:21 PM on September 1, 2011

I feel so small some times...
posted by cman at 6:54 PM on September 1, 2011

Let's see that in super-slo-mo!!!
posted by XhaustedProphet at 11:14 PM on September 1, 2011