01 July 2008
SOLARMAX
An IMAX film
Duration: 40 Min.
We are at the edge of a spiral galaxy … far from the galactic core...
Our Earth is a small planet … its pole crowned with a circle of "Northern Lights"…
The whole planet glows in the infrared warmth of a star we rarely think about…
A star we call the Sun.
Our Sun is a star … one of billions
It has shone for five billion years and will shine for five billion more...
For us, it is the great engine of life...
Ancient civilizations recognized the Sun as the source of all life and called it god… They observed it with care ... sometimes setting up stone markers to send that knowledge through time…
Aristotle taught that the world was round and theorized that the Sun and planets were carried in crystal spheres nested around the Earth … thus, misleading astronomers for centuries…
Copernicus had the courage to believe in a world spinning through space … a vast Universe of billions of stars…
It was a cosmos awesome enough for one of humanity’s great minds … Galileo was the first to look at the sky through a telescope and discovered that the Sun was not the flawless orb…
It was as spotty as a teenager!!!
Space has given us new eyes…
Everything we had glimpsed at before can be seen anew…
Built in England and France for the European Space Agency, with instruments from Europe and the United States of America, SOHO was launched by NASA and parked a million miles from Earth at a point where the gravity of Earth exactly balances the gravity of the Sun.
SOHO shows us the Sun as we have never seen it before...
Every sunrise brings hope…
For some, it is the hope that we can learn to do what the humblest plant can do…
Make clean and abundant energy directly from sunlight…
The subject of the film is humankind's struggle to understand the sun and the sun-earth relationship, from the earliest times to the present day. Structurally, the film will trace the ascent of humankind as expressed by our developing understanding of the sun, and through it, our universe. The underlying theme of the film is the triumph of knowledge over ignorance, of light over darkness. The sun is the only star that we can study directly but it is so completely ubiquitous, so intrinsic to life and culture, that we are effectively blind to it. It's time for a new look. Just as the telescope made the universe conceivable so new satellite borne instruments are allowing us to look at a sun that we have never seen before.
The film is tentatively scheduled to start showing 1 July 2008.