Swooping through the Universe

on the National Geographic Channel

A still from an animated scene of magnetic loops on the Sun. Courtesy National Geographic.

I just got through watching a preview copy of a program called Journey to the Edge of the Universe that is set to show on National Geographic Channel this coming Sunday night (December 7). It is written and produced by British science popularizer Nigel Henbest, who has spent many years doing books and articles, and producing TV shows about space science and astronomy.

Journey is a visually dramatic program about the exploration of the universe — from Earth out to the limits of the observable cosmos. The script kind of plays with the viewer’s emotions by suggesting the idea that the universe is a dangerous, frightening place — but yet one that we must explore.

That’s perhaps a bit too much drama for my own tastes, because the scientist in me says that black holes and other cosmic exotica aren’t scary–even though they are dangerous.

However, there’s no question that the producers are exploring dramatically active places and events that most people don’t get to see every day, so perhaps a bit of the hyperbole can be understood as an effort to really excite people about such amazing places as Mars and Europa and starbirth regions and galactic cores and quasars and black holes. The visualization of all these places alone is worth the watching, and it’s coupled with a narration by actor Alec Baldwin that sets a nice counterpoint. He brings a very warm and calm delivery to the program.

What I really found intriguing was the visual production of the show. One of the visual goals of the program was to make a single, epic camera move from Earth out to the observable limits of the cosmos. Now, as one-half of a producing pair (my husband and I create science documentaries for fulldome video), I can truly appreciate the magnitude of the effort this program took. It’s all CGI (computer animation) with the exception of a scene at the beginning, shot on a beach. From there, the show leaps out to an exploration of the planets, our Sun, our galaxy, starbirth and stardeath regions, quasars, black holes, and the Big Bang itself. And, it does all this in one long, twisting, winding, bouncing, spinning, traveling camera move, using visuals created by a highly talented group of animators in Canada and Britain.

Nigel Henbest wrote in a blog entry on the NatGeo site about a common challenge that all of us who produce about space face:  whether to try and weave together animations of celestial objects and events with the still imagery produced by NASA and the world’s observatories and space agencies. It’s a tough call because it costs a LOT of money and time to recreate science images as full animation sequences. At some point, you find yourself asking: why can’t we just use the stills and do camera moves on them?  It’s a stylistic and story-telling decision, and it’s really guided by the goals of the production. In the end, the production team decided to go with full animation and make what they created look as close as possible to what astronomers and astrovisualizers have created in the “official” images we see from NASA and other facilities.

Suffice to say, in many places in the show, the visualization effort is quite stunning — such as the sequence where we fly over the Sun and explore huge, towering prominences and magnetic loops. That part intrigued me because I’m currently working on a space weather project and being able to show people how those magnetic loops do their thing is a challenge!

There are a few nods here and there in the show to popular culture (mentions of Star Trek, for example), and one or two deft and subtle tributes to the late Carl Sagan (who died 12 years ago this month) and his outstanding work on the Cosmos series that started many of us on our own paths to documentary writing and production. Aside from a few nits that I picked at while watching the show (such as the title; there’s really not an “edge” to the universe so you can’t exactly go “to” that edge, and a sort of off-the-wall suggestion that perhaps squid could survive on Europa), I found this swoop through the cosmos intriguing, both as a documentary and as an example of one of the many different ways that those of us who write and produce about science do our jobs!