Posted by Davin Flateau on 15 Mar 2006 at 11:03 am.
Filed under General, Astronomy.
Even though I produce astronomy documentaries for the really big screen, I’m generally not a huge fan of ones produced for the small screen. Some TV astronomy documentaries go out of their way to bore the viewer, playing right into that stereotype that astronomy is an abstract and meaningless topic best left to the eggheads. Others are not so bad, but cover topics and missions that happened many years ago, draining the sense of wonder and ignoring the urgency that the current pace of discovery is creating.
Lately, The Science Channel has been spot on, producing good documentaries that talk about new missions that are happening right now.
Last night, I caught the excellent Revealing Mars, which focuses in on the current Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission, which just went into orbit around the red planet last week. It dives deep into each experiment on board, including the high-powered camera, radar and weather monitoring instruments.
Revealing Mars also talked in depth about the upcoming Mars Phoenix Lander in 2007-2008, and the ambitious car-sized Mars Science Laboratory rover, which now has a really bizarre and risky-looking landing scheme (hint - no more airbags). By the end of the show, I felt excited about what we were doing on Mars, and couldn’t wait to see the data from current and future missions. That’s the power of TV documentaries in today’s world of breakneck science.
Another Science Channel show that’s worth catching is Passport to Pluto, which covers the recently launched New Horizons probe to far flung Pluto. New Horizons will fly by the speck of a planet in humanity’s first visit there in 2015.
It’s refreshing to see current missions get a more elaborate treatment than the cursory 30 second blurb on the local news. But for a more sweeping view of the Universe, The Science Channel has been re-running what I consider the greatest TV documentary of all time - Cosmos (TV Listings).
Carl Sagan’s Cosmos inspired me to get into the business of astronomy education. It was a huge television event when it premiered on PBS in 1980, and being a 9 year old space cadet, I was excited to say the least. It was the day before VCRs, so I actually watched with an audio cassette tape recorder carefully placed near the tiny speaker in the TV to capture the lyrical musings of Carl Sagan. It was way past my bedtime, and I fell asleep before most episodes ended, but I always had those cassette tapes to play back the next day.
When I did play back those tapes, I was enthralled. Sagan was a storyteller, deftly weaving the individual threads from each episode into one giant tapestry relating the origin of our species, the air, trees, the grass, the planets, stars, galaxies, all the way out to the edge of space and time. Against a compelling soundtrack of electronic and classical music, he tells us that we are made of star stuff, and in sifting through a handful of sand on a beach, reflects on the fact that there are more suns in the Universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches on the earth. Sagan reminds us that solid science and critical thinking are the essential tools we use to understand the Universe around us while postulating that “We are a way for the Universe to know itself.”
I hadn’t watched it for 25 years (it was acutally out of print even on video for a period of time), so I wondered how it would translate into today’s high tech media world. Cosmos Studios re-produced the computer graphics, and updated the astronomical images in 2001. I’m happy to say that aside from a few turtlenecks and tweed jackets, it translates just great, and is incredibly refreshing to see such an artful and inspiring piece of television back in our lives. The entire Cosmos series is available on DVD.
Happy watching!
