Moonlight (Clair de Lune)
This visualization attempts to capture the mood of Claude Debussy's best-known composition, Clair de Lune (moonlight in French). The piece was published in 1905 as the third of four movements in the composer's Suite Bergamasque, and unlike the other parts of this work, Clair is quiet, contemplative, and slightly melancholy, evoking the feeling of a solitary walk through a moonlit garden.
The visuals were composed like a nature documentary, with clean cuts and a mostly stationary virtual camera. The viewer follows the Sun throughout a lunar day, seeing sunrises and then sunsets over prominent features on the Moon. The sprawling ray system surrounding Copernicus crater, for example, is revealed beneath receding shadows at sunrise and later slips back into darkness as night encroaches.
The visualization was created to accompany a performance of Clair de Lune by the National Symphony Orchestra Pops, led by conductor Emil de Cou, at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, on June 1 and 2, 2018, as part of a celebration of NASA's 60th anniversary.
The visualization uses a digital 3D model of the Moon built from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter global elevation maps and image mosaics. The lighting is derived from actual Sun angles during lunar days in 2018
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Solar Dynamics Observatory
Video in Spanish. Since 1200 until 1808 UTC (7:00 a.m. to 1:38 p.m. ET) on November 11, 2019, the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory observed as Mercurio moved to the Earth. The Solar Power Observatory observed the Earth in a variety of wave longitudes in the extreme ultraviolet light spectrum.
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Mercury Transit 2019 - 4K
Starting around approximately 1200 - 1808 UTC (7:00 am - 1:38pm ET) November 11, 2019, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory watched as Mercury move across the Sun. The Solar Dynamics Observatory views the Sun in a variety of wavelengths of light in the extreme ultraviolet. Music Credit: Frosted Lace by Matthew Charles Gilbert Davidson
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NASA Explores Earth’s Connections
For Earth Day 2021, we explore the connections of Earth systems and NASA's ability to observe them in a changing world, highlighting the links between dust transport, vegetation, water quality, conservation and human health, the cryosphere, and disasters.
Music credits: "Ellipsis" and "Terrafirma" by Ben Niblett and Jon Cotton [PRS] Universal Production Music
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A Web Around Asteroid Bennu
101955 Bennu is one of Earth’s closest planetary neighbors – an asteroid roughly the height of a skyscraper, and since late 2018, the place that NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission has called home. When OSIRIS-REx arrived on December 3, 2018, it began wrapping Bennu in a complex web of observations. OSIRIS-REx departed Bennu on May 10, 2021 on a return voyage to Earth, bringing with it over 60 grams of sample collected from the asteroid. This narrated video presents the mission’s complete trajectory during its time at Bennu.
Data provided by: NASA/University of Arizona/CSA/York University/Open University/MDA
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Chasing Sprites in Electric Skies
Paul Smith is a night-sky fanatic and photographer. His obsession is sprites: immense jolts of light that flicker high above thunderstorms. Last October, he guided NASA scientist Dr. Burcu Kosar through the backroads of Oklahoma to catch one herself. Although she’d studied sprites for more than 15 years, she hadn’t yet chased one.
Image credits: Paul Smith, Frankie Lucena, Panagiotis Tsouras, Thomas Ashcraft. All imagery of sprites is copyrighted and used with permission.
Music credits: “The Beauty Beyond” by Jeremy Noel William Abbott [PRS], Vasco [PRS]; “Outer Orbit” by Alexander Ryder Mcnair [ASCAP], Harry Gregson Williams [BMI], Ho Ling Tang [BMI]; “Wonderful Orbit” by Tom Furse Fairfax Cowan [PRS]; “Starlights” by Marc Teitler [PRS], Vasco [PRS]; “A Tranquil End” by Luke Gordon [PRS]; “Virtual Tidings” by Andrew Michael Britton [PRS], David Stephen Goldsmith [PRS]; “Winter Aurora” by Samuel Karl Bohn [PRS]; “Lava Flow” and “Water Dance” by Ben Niblett [PRS], Jon Cotton [PRS].
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133 Days on the Sun
This video chronicles solar activity from August 12 to December 22, 2022, as captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO . From its orbit in space around Earth, SDO has steadily imaged the Sun in 4K x 4K resolution for nearly 13 years. This information has enabled countless new discoveries about the workings of our closest star and how it influences the solar system.
With a triad of instruments, SDO captures an image of the Sun every 0.75 seconds. The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) instrument alone captures images every 12 seconds at 10 different wavelengths of light. This 133-day time lapse showcases photos taken at a wavelength of 17.1 nanometers, which is an extreme- ultraviolet wavelength that shows the Sun’s outermost atmospheric layer: the corona. Compiling images taken 108 seconds apart, the movie condenses 133 days, or about four months, of solar observations into 59 minutes. The video shows bright active regions passing across the face of the Sun as it rotates. The Sun rotates approximately once every 27 days. The loops extending above the bright regions are magnetic fields that have trapped hot, glowing plasma. These bright regions are also the source of solar flares, which appear as bright flashes as magnetic fields snap together in a process called magnetic reconnection.
While SDO has kept an unblinking eye pointed toward the Sun, there have been a few moments it missed. Some of the dark frames in the video are caused by Earth or the Moon eclipsing SDO as they pass between the spacecraft and the Sun. Other blackouts are caused by instrumentation being down or data errors. SDO transmits 1.4 terabytes of data to the ground every day. The images where the Sun is off-center were observed when SDO was calibrating its instruments.
SDO and other NASA missions will continue to watch our Sun in the years to come, providing further insights about our place in space and information to keep our astronauts and assets safe.
The music is a continuous mix from Lars Leonhard’s “Geometric Shapes” album, courtesy of the artist.
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4K Moon Views: Apollo 13's Stunning Lunar Landscapes
This video uses data gathered from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft to recreate some of the stunning views of the Moon that the Apollo 13 astronauts saw on their journey in 1970.
Music provided by Universal Production Music: "Visions of Grandeur" - Frederick Wiedmann
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