Cassini: "space fan"-made film, using NASA footage

CASSINI MISSION from cabbas on Vimeo.

Filmmaker Chris Abbas created the beautiful short film above, and explains:

I truly enjoy outer space. It's absolutely amazing that we now have the ability to send instruments out into the void of the universe to observe all sorts of interesting things. Asteroids! Moons! Planets! Dark matter! This is the perfect opportunity for a Carl Sagan quote: "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known." The footage in this little film was captured by the hardworking men and women at NASA with the Cassini Imaging Science System. If you're interested in learning more about Cassini and the on-going Cassini Solstice Mission, check it out at NASA's website.

(via Colin Peters)

• [Anonymous]

  This always bothered me–not so “cool”…
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini%E2%80%93Huygens#Plutonium_power_source

  • [Jake0748]

    Boo hoo, they used some plutonium. At least that was a few kilos of Pu, that wasn’t used for nuclear weapons, and was even removed from the planet, so it can never be.

    This video is so awesome… great work!

    “awesome footage was had for the comparatively small price of just one week in Iraq”. total win on that too.

    The fact that the film is in grey scale in no way detracts from its beauty or validity. Since all the photos were originally captured that way (and colorized later), makes the resolution and fidelity that much more valid.

  • [Michael Smith]

    Anon at #1,

    Its very difficult to operate on solar power beyond the orbit of Mars, and it pretty marginal there anyway. If we want to go to Jupiter and beyond then some form of nuclear power is going to be required.

• [SimplyAaron]

  …and all this awesome footage was had for the comparatively small price of just one week in Iraq. We need so much more of this!

  Not to mention that I love what the guy did with the film gathered, makes me happy.

• [Tau’ma]

  +1 with the universe.

• [NoctilucentStudios]

  WOW. That is like 28 million kinds of awesome right there. Excellent work!!

• [holtt]

  Nice Xeni, thanks for posting.

• [Flying_Monkey]

  Beautiful!

• [Anonymous]

  I’ve done this years before. But only as a “ken-burns” – slideshow. But possibly this was inspiration – it also included a Trent Reznor Soundtrack. http://www.veoh.com/watch/v6315667sbR3ge9G

• [lewis stoole]

  beautiful and sublime

• [Anonymous]

  In Space…

  …everything is black and white

• [jeligula]

  I am stunned. Truly dazzled. Also watching that again.

• [Anonymous]

  Nice. I love the inclusion of the cosmic ray hits on the detector. Major wonder of the 20th adn 21st cen. Not only do you live in a world, you live in a Solar System. You are a citizen of the Sun.

• [Anonymous]

  On a similar topic, those in the UK (or have proxys there) can watch ‘Destination Titan’ over on the bbc iplayer. It’s a documentary about the UK team that built the Surface Science Package for the Huygens lander.
  Bloody great program :)

• [Damon Law]

  Very nicely done. As a composer myself, I have something in a similar vein which I did back in 2007. I just uploaded a HD video of that here:

  http://vimeo.com/thestark/cassini

  Thanks for posting! Great video.

  Best,
  Damon Law, Composer @ http://theStark.com

• [wilberfan]

  Somewhere, Arthur C. Clarke is smiling…

• [NoctilucentStudios]

  I just had to come back in and say again…..AWESOME. Watched it many times in a row. Feels like it could be a scene from a film where the astronaut is losing his/her mind in deep space.

• [Anonymous]

  “This always bothered me–not so “cool”…
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini%E2%80%93Huygens#Plutonium_power_source”

  Why would this bother you? Are you worried that we’ll poison the universe?

  Personally, I can’t think of a better use for nuclear power.

• [blackistone]

  I also did something like this a couple years ago using multi-spectral NOAA GOES imagery: http://vimeo.com/17721201