Movies: Astronomy

Billions of years ago, Venus may have harbored life-giving habitats similar to those on the early Earth. Today, Earth's twin is a planet knocked upside down and turned inside out. Its burned-out surface is a global fossil of volcanic destruction, shr...

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

Photo sequence of the rare transit of Venus over the face of the Sun, one of the first chronophotographic sequences. In 1873, P.J.C. Janssen, or Pierre Jules César Janssen, invented the Photographic Revolver, which captured a series of images in a r...

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...

A college football star falls for his mousy French tutor....

An incredible travel through space and time between the walls of the Paris Observatory, which is celebrating its 350th birthday. Place of discoveries such as speed of light or Neptune’s existence, it is still today one of the oldest operating observa...

Alice is an insecure Leo girl who thinks the stars have made a mistake with her, until one day she receives a blank book with only instructions that promise that any astrological prediction written on those pages will come true. With the power to inf...

In this film, Méliès concocts a combination fairy- and morality tale about the foolishness of trying to look too deeply into the workings of an unstable and inscrutable universe. At a medieval school, an old astronomer begins to teach a class of youn...

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...

In Chile's Atacama Desert, astronomers peer deep into the cosmos in search for answers concerning the origins of life. Nearby, a group of women sift through the sand searching for body parts of loved ones, dumped unceremoniously by Pinochet's regime....

Four exceptional astronomers celebrate 50 years of work and friendship on a return road trip in the southwestern United States, recapturing youthful adventures and recounting each other's influences on the most exciting period in astronomy’s history....

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 team of international scientists attempt to document the first-ever image of a black hole....

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Armenian radio-engineer Arevik Sargsyan has struggled throughout her life to preserve ROT54, a giant telescope built by her uncle in the 1980s. But the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that ROT54 was left abandoned for 30 years. Now, Arevik is atte...

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....

The people of the planet Aeon, blessed with six suns, have never experienced night. When an archeological excavation uncovers evidence of an ancient catastrophe, all signs point towards the impending darkness of the very first Nightfall. Panic erupts...

A biography of Nicholas Copernicus covering 50 years of the astronomer's life - from his studies in Europe to his theological work all the way to the creation of his magnum opus, On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres....

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....

Kate Humble and Helen Czerski reveal the inner workings of the sun and investigate why scientists think changes in the sun's behaviour may have powerful effects on our climate....