This video was shown by Saul Perlmutter at the Seyfert Lecture. It starts with an artists conception of the supernova exploding and fading (over the course of several weeks) in an elliptical host galaxy. Then it fades to a real Hubble Space Telescope image of that host galaxy, and pans back, back, back, back, expanding the field of view until you see the night sky as you might just with your eyes outside, identifying the Big Dipper. It really gives you a visceral sense of just how far away this supernova was observed– a supernova that exploded some 10 billion years ago. This video comes from the hubblesite.org.

The animations below are MPEG4 files. On Linux, you can play it with MPlayer, which is what I used to play it in class. For Windows or Mac, you will need to download the plugin from DivX Player 5.0 (the link points to the download site for Windows, but from that page you can find a Mac player). This does seem to work under Windows 98 using Windows Media Player once you've installed the DIVX Codec; for Windows, the "free" non-Adware version appears to be sufficient on a four-year-old computer.

Large file warning! All of these are pretty big files; the sizes are indicated. 1-2MB files will take a long time to download over a modem, but will be no problem for a broadband connection. A 10MB file will take even a little while over a broadband connection, and will probably take more than an hour over a modem.

These movies were created using Blender, a free 3d modeling/animation program, with some help from The Gimp. It was encoded with MEncoder.

Celestial Sphere Movie (10MB AVI file)

This is the "celestial sphere" animation which was shown in class.

Earth Orbiting Sun (1.7MB AVI file)

An animation shown in class which shows the Earth orbiting the sun. The poles of the Earth are shown, so that you can see the 23.5 degree tilt relative to a line perpendicular to the plane of the Earth's orbit. After a couple of orbits, an extended "equatorial plane" appears, which extends out from the Earth's equator. As the Earth orbits the Sun, you can see that some times of the year the Sun is below the equator (at negative declination, and thus low in the sky in the northern hemisphere, making it winter), while at six months later the Sun is above the equator (at positive declination, and thus high in the sky in the northern hemisphere, making it summer).

Moon Phase Movie (1MB AVI file)

This is an animation which demonstrates the phases of the moon. Like the video above, it's an AVI movie file which uses the MPEG4 compression algorithm, and was created with Blender and The Gimp. Maps of Earth and the Moon came from James Hastings-Trew's Planetary Image Maps page.

The Moon's Apparent Motion (3MB AVI file)

This shows the moon orbiting the Earth, both from "above" (i.e. looking down on the North Pole), and from the point of view of somebody standing in the northern hemisphere facing south. It demonstrates how the moon moves relative to the background stars from one night to the next.