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Music by Kevin Macleod (“Decisions”) and DigitalR3public (“Restart”).

This year marks the 23rd year of observing for the Hubble Space Telescope. Alongside cutting-edge science, the orbiting observatory has produced countless stunning astronomical images. Some of the most striking and beautiful subjects of Hubble’s images have been nebulae — vast interstellar clouds of gas and dust.

This new Hubble image, captured and released to celebrate this milestone, shows part of the sky in the constellation of Orion (The Hunter). Rising like a giant seahorse from turbulent waves of dust and gas is the Horsehead Nebula, otherwise known as Barnard 33. The nebula formed from a collapsing interstellar cloud of material, and glows as it is illuminated by a nearby hot star [1].

The gas clouds surrounding the Horsehead have already dissipated, but the jutting pillar is made of stronger stuff — thick clumps of material — that is harder to erode. Astronomers estimate that the Horsehead formation has about five million years left before it too disintegrates.

This nebula is a very well-known object and a popular target for observations, most of which show the Horsehead as a dark cloud silhouetted against a background of glowing gas. This new image shows the same region in infrared light, which has longer wavelengths than visible light and can pierce through the dusty material that usually obscures the nebula’s inner regions. The result is a rather ethereal and fragile-looking structure, made of delicate folds of gas — very different to the nebula’s appearance in visible light.

We cannot see infrared radiation with our eyes or with standard cameras, which are designed to detect optical light. To observe these objects

The show takes us back 74,000 years ago, to the island of Sumatra. A volcanic eruption triggered the sudden and violent collapse of a vast regional plateau. Toba, as the volcano is known today, was the largest volcanic eruption in the last 25 million years. But Earth has seen far larger. 250 million years ago, an eruption in what’s now Siberia lasted a million years and was probably responsible for the greatest episode of mass extinction in Earth’s history.

Supervolcanoes is an immersive planetarium show that looks back at rare classes of eruptions that have marshaled the energy that lurks, like a sleeping dragon, beneath the surface of planet Earth. The program moves beyond Earth to explore the impact of giant volcanic eruptions around our solar system. Audiences will fly down to Neptune’s frigid moon Triton, and onto the ultimate volcanic world: Jupiter’s moon Io. On a visit to a legendary North American hot spot, Yellowstone National Park, the film asks: can a supervolcano erupt in our time?

Supervolcanoes is a co-production of Spitz Creative Media, Mirage3D and Thomas Lucas Productions, Inc., in association with the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, with support from the Pennsylvania Film Council.

Sixty-six state-of-the-art antennas observe the Universe at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths — one thousand times longer than visible wavelengths. This light reaches us from some of the coldest and most distant objects in the Universe. Water vapor in the atmosphere blocks these faint whispers from the hidden Universe, so to collect them we have to go to an extremely high and dry site — like Chajnantor.

The 66 antennas on the high plateau are a critical part of ALMA. Their big dishes collect the faint millimeter waves from space. These antennas are truly the state-of-the-art. Their surfaces are accurate to much less than the thickness of a sheet of paper. They can move precisely enough to pick out a golf ball at a distance of 15 kilometers.

In a truly global endeavor, the antenna components were constructed in several locations around the world, sent to Chile to be assembled. Detectors in each antenna register the finest nuances of the faint signals collected by the dishes. These detectors are the most sensitive of their kind and are cooled using helium gas to just four degrees above absolute zero.

Millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths give astronomers a unique window on the Universe. But to see them with the sharpness astronomers need, a single-dish telescope would have to be kilometers across (a

December 19, 1972… the splashdown of the Apollo 17 crew capsule marked the end of the golden age of manned spaceflight. The Mercury…. Gemini… and Apollo programs had proven that we could send people into space… To orbit the Earth…. Fly out beyond our planet… Then land on the moon and walk among its ancient crater.

The collective will to send people beyond our planet faded in times of economic uncertainty, war, and shifting priorities. And yet, just five years after Apollo ended, scientists launched a new vision that was just as profound and even more far-reaching.

It didn’t all go smoothly. Early computer problems threatened to doom Voyager 2. Then its radio receiver failed, forcing engineers to use a back up. Now, after more than three and a half decades of successful operations, the twin spacecraft are sending back information on their flight into interstellar space. Along the way, they have revealed a solar system rich beyond our imagining.

The journey was made possible by a rare alignment of the planets, a configuration that occurs only once every 176 years. That enabled the craft to go from planet to planet, accelerating as they entered the gravitational field of one, then flying out to the next. The Voyagers carried a battery of scientific equipment to collect data on the unknown worlds in their path. That included a pair of vidicom cameras, and a data transfer rate slower than a dialup modem.

Most stars in the Universe are small and insignificant, like our Sun They eventually fizzle and die without much drama. But a few light up the sky when they die, and in the process, they don’t just tell us about the lives of stars: they create the building blocks of life, and help us to unravel the whole history of the Universe. These are the stars that end their lives as supernovae, explosions that are among the most violent events in the Universe.