Movies for Introductory Astronomy

created by Robert Knop

[Back to Rob Knop's Astronomy Education Resources]

Overview

These are movies designed for use in lecture during an astronomy class. By and large they are for traditional "lecture" parts of lecture, although one was designed as an answer to a ConcepTest. Although I put them online for students, they don't have narration nor are they complete in and of themselves. They are designed for instructors to discuss as they play, pausing them and either pointing out features or asking predictive questions at different times during the animation.

The movies were put together using Blender, an open-source 3d modelling and animation package.

The animations are all AVI files encoded with MPEG4. This is a standard format, and probably all recent media players will handle it. if you have an older computer, you may need to install a plugin or codec. On Linux, MPlayer does a fine job with these movies. Please let me know if you have trouble playing the movies.

Note: I've been told that newer versions of Windows Media Player don't seem to have the codec needed for these movies. To solve this problem, repartition your hard drive, install Linu... what? Oh, sorry. You can try installing this codec, which may get the movies to play properly under Windows.

To download a movie and save it to your machine, shift-click on the play movie link on each page. Note: some of these movie files are very large, and may take a while to download, especially over dial-up links! The size in MB of each movie is listed on the movie's page. Assume 5-30 seconds per MB to download a movie over a broadband link, or about 2 minutes per MB to download a movie over a dialup connection.

The Movies

	The Celestial Sphere A movie which shows the celstial sphere from inside and out. It zooms in and out, in an attempt to connect the drawings we make of the celstial sphere with what one sees in the sky.
	The Motion of the Zenith A simple movie that shows the celestial sphere rotating about an observer in the Northern Hemisphere. Used to demonstrated that the Zenith is at a constant declination, but a variable right ascension.
	North & South No, not a Civil War reference for a college from Tennessee.... Rather, a quick movie that shows how the rising stars would appear to move to an observer in the Northern vs. Southern hemisphere.
	The Sun's Position The Earth orbits the Sun within the celestial sphere, showing the Sun's position on the celestial sphere at various times during the year.
	The Ecliptic The motion of the Sun around the ecliptic over the course of a year.
	A Month on the Ecliptic The rotation of the celestial sphere over the course of the month, with the Sun moving along the ecliptic the appropriate amount.
	The Sun's Declination Shows how the tilt of the Earth's axis means that the Sun is sometimes above the equator, and sometimes below the equator.
	The Phases of the Moon The phases of the Moon over a month, looking "down" on the Earth/Moon system, and zooming in to show how it would look to somebody on the Earth.
	Where Will The Moon Be Tomorrow? An animation created to answer an in-class multiple choice question about how far the moon moves across the sky during one day.
	The Expanding Universe A model two-dimensional closed universe with several galaxies, showing how the galaxies get farther apart (but not bigger) without moving "through space" as the universe expands.
	Cosmological Redshift A photon travels from one galaxy to another, with its wavelength expanding in proportion to the universe.
	The Hubble Expansion Three movies of a flat-two dimensional expanding Universe that demonstrate some properties of a uniform expansion.

Use of these Movies

You are free to download and use these movies in your classroom, or for any other non-commercial purpose. You may also modify them, or use them in other projects, as long as any distribution of modified version or projects that use them is done under the same terms.

The two "Moon" movies should also include in the attribution: Earth and Moon textures by Tor Øera. (http://www.oera.net/How2/TextureMaps.html.)

Any Celestial Sphere movie, and the "Sun's Declination" movie, should include the attribution: Earth texture by Rick Kohrs.