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Here are two stars -- the Hubble Space Telescope and the IMAX camera -- that make a perfect screen team. Their vehicle is the IMAX film "Hubble 3D," which opens today at Carnegie Science Center's Rangos Omnimax Theater.
The Hubble was launched in 1990, and for nearly two decades it has been our window onto the universe, giving astronomers a greater understanding of deep space.
"Hubble 3D" combines some of the amazing images the Hubble has captured with dazzling three-dimensional simulated flights through space. It also takes audiences aboard the 2009 Space Shuttle Atlantis mission, when the crew did camera and equipment upgrades and repairs on the space telescope.
"When you visit the Hubble website and see those incredible pictures, you start to think about how they would look on the big screen and how people would react," said producer/director Toni Myers in the film's production notes. "This is what IMAX was made for, to take people where they could never actually go."
Leonardo DiCaprio narrates this journey through space and time.
The Science Center's Omnimax is not a 3-D IMAX, and the 3-D version isn't coming to local commercial IMAX theaters. But the flight sequences through deep space are still very effective. They incorporate images and data collected by the Hubble, using computer visualization techniques to build visual three-dimensional models of galaxies and nebulae.
The flight takes us past Sirius, one of Earth's closest star neighbors, into the nebula in Orion's Belt, where the viewer sees a cosmic "nursery" -- the birth and formation of new stars and solar systems. It leaves our home galaxy -- the Milky Way -- and heads for Andromeda, 2.5 million light years away, and then to the Virgo Cluster of galaxies. The 3-D flight simulations were created with the imaging team at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
They couldn't fit an IMAX camera crew aboard the shuttle, so the astronauts had to learn how to use the giant camera. They trained with director of photography James Neihouse, a veteran of several IMAX-in-space films ("Space Station 3D," "Hail Columbia!" and "Roving Mars"). Images taken with high-definition digital cameras and handheld video cameras were converted through IMAX digital re-mastering technology.
The astronaut/cinematographers faced lighting challenges no ground camera crew would have to deal with. The sun rose or set every 45 minutes while the Atlantis was orbiting Earth.
And it's not as if they didn't already have their hands full. The IMAX sequences of the crew's spacewalks capture the mission's drama and tension. The film also details the tricky and delicate maneuvers needed to perform the maintenance and repair tasks on the Hubble, and the problems they encountered. And it offers a down-to-earth, behind-the-scenes view of everyday life on Atlantis.
Although "Hubble" takes us to the edges of the universe as we know it, it also leaves us with a deeper appreciation of our own corner of it. The IMAX images of Earth from space give viewers a view of their home planet that only astronauts have seen.
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