The Kid Should See This.
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There's just so much science, nature, music, art, technology, storytelling and assorted good stuff out there that my kids (and maybe your kids) haven't seen. It's most likely not stuff that was made for them...
But we don't underestimate kids around here.
Kid-friendly not-made-for-kids videos for all! Collected by Rion Nakaya and her three four year old co-curator.
Tip Jar: Curating this blog takes work! If you like the videos on this site, please support the science education projects that we've picked on DonorsChoose.org.
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Early this morning at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, SpaceX launched the first ever private spacecraft — the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket — to the International Space Station on an unmanned mission to deliver food, clothes, other supplies, and science experiments to the astronauts who are currently stationed there. And this is only the first of 11 more planned flights to the space station. Incredible and historic!!!
And stay til the end of the video, where at around the 10m mark, Falcon 9 and Dragon go into orbit and we get to see Mission Control, and (eventually) some (relieved) high fives and hugs.
from NASA Television. (Updated with embed-capable video.)
From the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, Measuring the Universe! So how exactly do we measure things that are incredibly far away? Positioning over time, light, and math, math, math! This video contains a lot of information — even about sound waves and color shifts in light — but it’s such a great start to understanding how we see and measure what’s out beyond our Earth and our galaxy. And it demonstrates how important math and patience are in science!
via The Awesomer.
From Science Friday, behold A Spacesuit Ballet:
Of the suit he wore on the moon, Neil Armstrong wrote, “it was tough, reliable, and almost cuddly.” But that cuddly suit, made by the company Playtex, had some stiff competition (literally) from rival rigid, metal designs. This video features archival NASA footage of mobility tests for several spacesuit prototypes. Music is from the band One Ring Zero’s album “Planets”.
Watching this Planetary Resources video about their mission to near-Earth asteroids makes me feel like I’m watching a made-up video from a movie set in the future. But once again, the future is now and is being backed by a handfull of multi-millionaires who are using the private sector to find water and platinum, among other valuable resources, in space.
Using image sequences from NASA’s Cassini Solstice and Voyager missions, filmmaker Sander van den Berg has illuminated Saturn and its rings, Jupiter, moons, space and a bunch of other stuff.
The score is an instrumental version of That Home by The Cinematic Orchestra, which gives this footage a completely different feel than a video I saw late last year by filmmaker Chris Abbas when he put this same footage to Nine Inch Nails. Both videos are riveting, no?
Thanks, @mamagotcha.
The California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco has created a primer on NASA’s Kepler Mission. Kepler has found over 1200 planet candidates, 54 of them in the habitable or “Goldilocks” zone. How do we see these planets from so so so so so far away? We measure light!
What to watch next: ScienceCasts: Getting to Know the Goldilocks Planet.
One of the kiddo’s favorite songs from They Might Be Giants’ Here Comes Science — after Meet the Elements, of course — here comes What is a Shooting Star? (Hint: A shooting star is not a star, it’s not a star at all. A shooting star’s a meteor that’s heading for a fall…)
This raw movie footage was taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft as it raced towards Jupiter in February 1979. Clearly visible is the constantly changing attitude of Voyager’s scan platform, which houses the narrow angle camera that took this particular sequence.
In total, 3531 frames were aligned to produce this film.
This 33 year old moving image has an old quality, and yet it still feels like the future. A few facts to narrate over this silent film:
Jupiter is the fourth brightest object in the sky (after the Sun, the Moon and Venus)… in 1610 when Galileo first pointed a telescope at the sky he discovered upiter’s four large moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto (now known as the Galilean moons)…
Jupiter was first visited by Pioneer 10 in 1973 and later by Pioneer 11, Voyager 1, Voyager 2 and Ulysses. The spacecraft Galileo orbited Jupiter for eight years. It is still regularly observed by the Hubble Space Telescope.
The gas planets do not have solid surfaces, their gaseous material simply gets denser with depth… What we see when looking at these planets is the tops of clouds high in their atmospheres…
Jupiter is about 90% hydrogen and 10% helium… with traces of methane, water, ammonia and “rock”. This is very close to the composition of the primordial Solar Nebula from which the entire solar system was formed. Saturn has a similar composition, but Uranus and Neptune have much less hydrogen and helium.
via @spacefuture.
EsoCast showcases a new Hubble image of a giant cloud of hydrogen gas illuminated by a bright young star. The image shows how violent the end stages of the star formation process can be, with the young object shaking up its stellar nursery…
Despite the celestial colors of this picture, there is nothing peaceful about this scene. A young star, named S106 IR, is being born at the heart of the nebula. In the violent final stages of its formation, the star is ejecting material at high speed, violently disrupting the gas and dust.
