The Sombrero Galaxy. Credit: NASA and the The Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI)
We all go to the movies to see stars. But the audience for the IMAX film “Hubble: Galaxies Across Space and Time” gets to see the universe.
Produced by the Office of Public Outreach at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), the organization responsible for conducting and coordinating the science operations of the Hubble Space Telescope, this film blends Hubble’s high-resolution images of deep space with video animation techniques to take armchair astronauts on a 10-billion-light-year trip in only three minutes.
The goal of the STScI team was to create a short film digitally and in-house on a limited budget and to offer the finished product to large-format theaters as a public service. But to make this plan a reality, the team had to devise a way to take the large images and present them in a way that would preserve their original resolution. Only IMAX theaters, with screens literally the size of a building, could support this.
“We wanted people to really see what Hubble sees. I know we went well beyond Shake’s published limits, but it worked.”
Two Problems, Two Solutions
The team faced two major roadblocks in the production of the film. The first was money. IMAX production costs hundreds of thousands of dollar per minute — far more than the institute’s budget would allow.
Fortunately, Jim O’Leary of the Maryland Science Center was able to introduce the STScI team to David Keighley of DKP 70MM Productions, Inc., a subsidiary of IMAX Corporation. David offered to donate the services and materials necessary to make an IMAX film out of the digital frames captured by STScl. It was the generosity of DKP 70MM Productions that allowed the film to become a reality.
The second problem was technical. How to take a 627-million-pixel image and turn it into a film? The answer to that problem was Shake.
The Cat's Eye Nebula. Credit: NASA, ESA, HEIC and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Creating Mosaics of the Stars
The raw material the team had to work with was obtained by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). Installed in 2002 by astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia, the ACS is really three cameras in one: a wide-field camera, a high-resolution camera and a solar-blind camera sensitive to ultraviolet light. The ACS also has a coronagraph that blocks out the glare of bright objects so astronomers can study fainter objects in the same vicinity. A single ACS image is 4096 x 4096 pixels — compare that to HDTV at 1920 x 1080. Then consider that STScI had to create mosaics made up of 16 such images and you’ll get an idea of what they were dealing with.
STScI senior video animator Greg Bacon recalls: “When the first ACS high-resolution images arrived, we wondered how we were going to display them. A single ACS image contains an IMAX-screen worth of pixels and we had plans to produce some truly immense images by making mosaics of several ACS images.”
Next Page: Seeing What the Hubble Sees
