New Film About the Hubble Space Telescope Invents New Techniques

This month, a unique film and musical experience, inspired by the Hubble Space Telescope's iconic Deep Field image, premiered in Florida at the Kennedy Space Center and is now available online on Youtube for free.

​The film, titled Deep Field: The Impossible Magnitude of our Universe, a 30-minute documentary, features a variety of incredible Hubble imagery of far-away galaxies and includes computer-generated visualizations of star clusters developed by the Space Telescope Science Institute. (STSci) It is definitely worth watching for any amature space astronomers. Those visualizations not only depict the awesome beauty of the universe, but also express the three-dimensional nature of celestial objects in away never before experienced by the public.

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into Earth’s orbit in 90s and is one of the largest and versatile telescopes in operation. It was built by NASA along with the European Space Agency. It was inception began in the 70s with a proposed launch in 83 but project was delayed by budget problems.

While there have been IMAX and Hubble 3D documentary films, The Deep Field experience, is a unique collaboration between Grammy award-winning composer Eric Whitacre, producers Music Productions, multi award-winning artists 59 Productions, and The Space Telescope Science Institute.

The film paints the incredible story of the Hubble telescope an extraordinary portrait of the universe revealed by Hubble when it was pointed at a tiny and completely dark patch of sky for a total exposure time of about six days. What it revealed was an image that contained over 3,000 galaxies scattered across space and time.

For Deep Field, the team worked with 59 Productions, which is based in London, England and id best known for its video graphics of the 2012 Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony, to revise and adapt seven previously produced sequences to fit into the symphonic and astronomical narrative. The STScI team also developed four new astronomical sequences for the film.

There have been nothing like this one-of-kind collaboration, blending science and art together to create a new masterpiece. To create these animations, the STScI team had to invent new techniques that they hadn't used before. The complex calculations required to model the galaxies strained the limits of their computational capabilities. The struggle was to present something cinematic yet accurate. The result is something extremely breathtaking.

Hubble images of the galaxy group known as Stephan's Quintet, which is a group of five galaxies of which four form the first cluster of galaxies ever discovered, were transformed into intergalactic experiences that take viewers soaring through the cosmos. The team also worked with supercomputer simulations from astronomers at Caltech University to construct and fly through an extraordinarily detailed three-dimensional model of our galaxy.

Deep Field will be shared with the world through multiple film screenings and live orchestra performances in concert halls, planetariums, museums, and science centers across the world.