Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (~13 hours)
For a decade, Carl Sagan's Cosmos was the most watched series in public television history. It introduced me to one of my favorite authors, and it helped instill a young me with a healthy sense of awe. The entire series consists of 13 hour-long episodes, presenting the sweep of human history as told through the discoveries of science. I re-watched the whole series while I was in college, and it held up surprisingly well. Although it was fun to make note of the march of progress. Often I found that the open questions had been answered and occasionally our understanding of a topic had grown more nuanced, but overall it is still the great program that it was back in the 80s.
LINKS GOOD ON 2011-08-29
Powers of Ten (9m:01s)
Starting with a meter wide field of view and moving back steadily to one some 15 billion light-years across, Powers of Ten is a classic short film created in 1968 to help illustrate well... the powers of ten. When I taught astronomy, I would always open our class with a showing of the modernized version, Cosmic Voyage
LINKS GOOD ON 2011-08-28
What is Dark Matter? (1m:09s)
I would have been happier if this video had been a little less conclusory, but given the self-imposed time constrain, I'm willing to let it go, and you can learn more about dark matter here. This video actually is actually a winner of the Phylm Prize, and its producer, Henry Reich, has made quite a few more episodes in the series. You should head over to his YouTube channel and give them a look.
LINKS GOOD ON 2011-08-28
Around the World (1m:02s)
YouTube user yesterday2221 has put together this time-lapse of images from the International Space Station. Starting over the Pacific ocean at night and ending with daybreak over Antartica, it's quite a show.
LINKS GOOD ON 2011-09-18
Aurora Awe (1m:04s)
These majestic dancing lights in the sky are actually not far removed from the glow of that neon sign down the street. In these gas is trapped in tubes and excited by electric current. While in the aurora charged particles ejected from the sun are funneled towards the poles by the earth's magnetic field where they excite gases in the upper atmosphere. It's the same basic idea but somehow a heck of a lot more beautiful.
LINKS GOOD ON 2011-08-28
Why Does the Sun Shine (~5m together)
These two videos come from They Might Be Giants' great album called Here Comes Science. The first video is a reprise of Why Does the Sun Shine, a song they included on their 1993 EP by the same name. The second video is a correction, making clear that the sun is not comprised of gas but rather plasma. The whole album is great, and you should give it a listen
LINKS GOOD ON 2011-08-28
MARS Dead or Alive (46m:07s)
This video follows the creation and use of NASA's semi-autonomous Mars rovers--Spirit and Opportunity. I remember watching this hours after Spirit's January 3, 2004 landing on MARS. It was wonderfully exciting, watching the project's history then immediately seeing the first images back from the surface. Every NASA mission should be shadowed by such a talented film crew.
This episode is one of two. The second, Welcome to Mars, can also be found on Hulu.
LINKS GOOD ON 2011-08-28
The Hammer and the Feather (50s)
If Aristotle had grown up in space his physics intuition might have been better. He believed heavy objects fell faster than light ones, but it turns out that when you take drag into account an object's weight doesn't matter. David Scott, Apollo 15 astronaut, tests this prediction made by Galileo Galilei several hundred years after we are told Galileo attempted a similar experiment atop the leaning tower of Pisa. Galileo's tale may be apocryphal, but Scott's is verifiable.
LINKS GOOD ON 2011-08-28
Free-fall = Weightless (28s)
Having just seen a hammer and feather fall at the same rate, it should be no surprise that planes and people too can fall at the same rate. In this clip a plane undergoes a controlled parabolic fall along with its contents. Since the person and the plane are both falling at the same rate the person appears weightless. This is free-fall and why astronauts appear weightless. They are NOT so far from earth that gravity doesn't pull on them. Orbiting is just falling without hitting the ground.
LINKS GOOD ON 2011-08-28
Matters of Size (1m:36s)
Simple slide show depicting the relative size of objects in the cosmos. Nothing new here, but for my 1st years (12 year-olds), this is just the sort of visual example which gets them thinking. They also really respond to making scale models out of plasticine, and you can get custom dimensions from this site (Build Your Own Solar System).
LINKS GOOD ON 2011-08-28
TED Talk by Spacecraft Designer Burt Rutan (2006) (20m:17s)
Burt Rutan's company Scaled Composites won the Ansari X Prize by building a sub-orbital honest to goodness spacecraft. I've long been skeptical of space tourism. Something about the Soviet model leaves a bad taste in my mouth, a little like millionaires paying to ride on an aircraft carrier during wartime. The X prize and Rutan's vision, however, strike me as different. They aren't the bastardization of scientific exploration but the independent birth of entrepreneurial and adventurous spirit. In this clip, Rutan shares his vision for the future of space flight, and the sky's the limit.
Rutan's brainchild, SpaceShipOne, is a spectacular feat of engineering, a spacecraft built out of fabric and glue!
LINKS GOOD ON 2011-08-28
In addition to collecting other people's videos, I produce my own intermittent video series. It presents answers to science questions, demos, experiments and the like.