Movies: Astronomy

Three billion miles away a grand-piano-sized spacecraft is speeding through the outer solar system at nearly 1,000 miles per minute. After nearly a decade in space, the New Horizons space probe will have just 86 seconds to complete its primary missio...

The year is 1985. Oliver, a boy with an overflowing imagination, moves with his family to the southernmost corner of Europe, just as Halley's Comet is about to pass by. These events will mark a before and after in the emotional life of Óliver, who wi...

Chaco Canyon, located in northwest New Mexico, is perhaps the only site in the world constructed in an elaborate pattern that mirrors the yearly cycle of the sun and the 19-year cycle of the moon. How did an ancient civilization, with no known writte...

A look at the Sun, the star that revolves at the center of the Solar System, and its representation in art throughout history....

This film tells the surprising story of how the Allegheny Observatory has been a world leader in the study of the stars since the 1860s. Self-educated, and often facing unrelenting hardships, the people associated with the Allegheny Observatory defie...

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In our terrestrial view of things, the speed of light seems incredibly fast. But as soon as you view it against the vast distances of the universe, it's unfortunately very slow. This animation illustrates, in realtime, the journey of a photon of ligh...

Faced with the risk of collision with the Earth, space agencies are refining their observations on the course of asteroids in our galaxy. A documented state of the art of the current programs....

In a feast of colours and sounds, Mayan Archaeoastronomy: Observers of the Universe makes a tour of 6 Mayan temples: San Gervasio, Chichen Itzá, Uxmal, Edzná, Palenque and Bonampak where the spectator dives into a Mayan world of knowledge about the i...

When a young man drops out of school to care for his agoraphobic mother he too finds himself increasingly insulated from the outside world....

Documentary about the Griffith Observatory, shown at their Leonard Nimoy Event Horizon Theater...

China's FAST (Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope) can detect radio signals emitted tens of thousands of light-years away, and engineers have faced unprecedented challenges in constructing a giant radio receptor nestled amid mountains. Fr...

What forms might life take in the Solar System and beyond? In the Academy's newest original planetarium show, see how a deeper understanding of Earth might help us locate other living worlds, light years away....

An astronomy lesson on the scope of the universe by an impassioned substitute teacher sends a pair of high schoolers on an odyssey deep into the mind and out to the galaxies....

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Since it explored Pluto in 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft has been zooming toward NASA's most distant target yet. Join the mission team as the probe attempts to fly by Ultima Thule, an object 4 billion miles from Earth....

Orson Welles — with contributions from scientists George Wald, Carl Sagan, and others — examines the possibility and implications of extraterrestrial life. In examining our perceptions of alien 'martians' from his "War of the Worlds" broadcast, to th...

The Great Year is a compelling documentary that explores the possibility that the fall of ancient civilizations around the globe, and the rise of modern civilization, might be related to our Sun’s motion around a companion star. The film examines evi...

Cave paintings and lunar calendars exist in the caves and remains of prehistoric hunters studied recently. What if Prehistoric Man were clever enough to develop in depth scientific knowledge? As unlikely as it may seem, new data tend to prove that Pr...

The first feature from Alison McAlpine is a dialogue with the heavens—in this case, the heavens above the Andes and the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, where she alights on the desert- and mountain-dwelling astronomers, fishermen, miners, and cowbo...