|
Horizon
BBC2, Monday 15 August
9:00pm - 10:00pm
2/6 Seeing Stars
This is one of those Horizon films that stirs a sense of pure wonder. It's partly wonder at the weirdness of the universe out there - neutrinos, supermassive black holes and so on. But mostly the film is about the new wave of telescopes that are driving 21st-century astronomy - the eyes with which we peer into the heavens. Don't be thinking of a telescope as a tube with a lens at either end, by the way. The instruments here are on a different scale. There's Alma, an observatory of 66 giant antennas arranged in an array ten miles across, high in the Chilean desert. Or there's Sofia, a flying telescope housed in a converted jumbo jet, which conducts infrared astronomy eight miles up in the stratosphere. Or there's the 500 detectors scattered across Utah that look like rusty beds but in fact pick up cosmic rays. In all this you have to marvel at the engineering feats that go into exploring the unknown. And the money involved: Nasa's James Webb Space Telescope, designed to orbit a million miles from Earth, will have 100 times the power of Hubble, and a staggering price tag of $6.8 billion. After watching this film, you may think it's worth it.
Radio Times reviewer - David Butcher
VIDEO Plus+: 7134
Subtitled, Widescreen, High definition
Directed by: Ben Lawrie
|
