Outer Space from Sander van den Berg on Vimeo.

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

I just found this on Gordan Ugarkovic’s Flickr page. I just sped up the frame rate.

There is not really anything for me to add except… this is actually pretty excellent and listenable.

CASSINI MISSION from Chris Abbas on Vimeo.

Gorgeous idea — taking the raw images from the Cassini mission and making a long flip-book style movie. Leaving in the flaws and noise of raw images happens to add a nice stylistic touch to the overall feeling of the film. The nature of multiple images taken by the spacecraft often with large and small gaps in time coincidentally makes some engaging jumpy into smooth segments.

Voyager 1 Approach Video by Bjorn Jonsson from Chopping Block on Vimeo.

“This movie is different from similar Voyager movies because I’m keeping Jupiter’s size constant. This is accomplished by reprojecting the source images to simple cylindrical projection and then rendering everything using the same viewing geometry. I also sharpened the images a bit to better reveal various details.” — Bjorn Jonsson

The time lapse estimation is about 10 Earth hours per second. Special thanks to unmannedspaceflight.com for all the awesome.

Paul Schenk has been taking new and old data from missions to the various moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and building 3-D models of what it might be like to fly through some of their more fascinating features. These are renders built from actual images, so often you might see areas of lower resolution due to a lack of better mission data. The one posted above of Hi’iaka Montes on Io is one of the best on his youTube page as the data available from the region is mostly in high resolution with few gaps.

If you haven’t followed the work of Stephen v2 and his film “Outside In”, you might want to take a look at what he has in store for us. Using only still images from the Cassini mission, Stephen is making a very impressive tour of the Saturn system without using any CGI, 3D models or textures. While those techniques make great Hollywood films they often fall short of making something that is actually a real place… look real. See below for a very brief clip of how this all ends up looking with a much better and longer clip coming in the near future.

from New “Outside In” clip teaser from stephen v2 on Vimeo.

What it might have looked like to be riding Cassini as it rounded the pole of Iapetus from the last encounter. The animation was compiled using images composed by Gordan Ugarkovic.

Astro0 (a contributor to unmannedspaceflight.com) had been looking through a 159 frame set of images that showed a tiny portion of Saturn’s sunlit limb. He animated it just to see the effect and happened upon a pretty nice animation of a Saturnian aurora (click here for the animation). Which is likely the first time we are seeing an aurora on another world so clearly animated.

To be clear… the spots that stand still in the animation are artifacts of the images. The streaks are stars seemingly flying by due to Cassini’s cameras being trained on one spot as it and Saturn itself are moving through space. Astro0’s blog can be found here and I suspect will soon feature a post with more details on the animation in the very near future.

Another Gordan Ugarkovic. It never ends!

Follow the Apollo 11 mission in real time at wechosethemoon.org for the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11. The site comes complete with a gorgeous mission animation that shows the viewer what stage the mission is in as the data loads in the background. Once the page opens up we are treated to various interactive modules like photo and video galleries featuring material from the current stage of the mission as well as an oddly placed JFK and Apollo gallery.

The best part is the real-time audio stream. As I am writing this, the astronauts are asleep and every 15 minutes mission control interrupts the static to essentially report how long they have been asleep and that the mission is progressing nominally. As boring as that is… it sure makes it real and takes those too young to have been a part of it as close to knowing how that might have felt to follow this historic event. Of course, the whole thing peaks on the 20th with the real-time streaming of touch down at Tranquility Base.

Also see NASA’s newly restored footage of Apollo 11 and Neil Armstrong’s magnificent first step.

This video was compiled and the music composed by Jeff Sheilds aka Podcast Troubadour. Some may recall Jeff also composed these themes for The Carnival of Space for September 2007.

While astronaut Don Pettit was living aboard the International Space Station (ISS), he used some of his off-duty time to make time lapse videos of what he was seeing outside of the ISS window. There are a few examples of this work in this video from Science Friday (NPR). It begins with some beautiful aurora followed by a view of the solar panels rotating (they do this every 90 mins) and a simple look at the earth whirling about through a portal window.

See also this experiment involving candy corns.