D.C. Museum Hosts Hubble 3D World Film Premiere

On March 19, 2010, the world will get to see exactly why the repairs to the Hubble Space Telescope were so important. This 43-minute film narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio tells the story of protagonist who has had "more near death experiences than any film hero." The telescope needed to be repaired and three flight crews risked their lives to fix it in zero gravity 347 miles above the earth's surface. What makes this film different from any kind of school time educational video is that for the first time ever, the images captured by Hubble are in three dimensional splendor, allowing the camera to take your eyes inside a living, breathing nebula.

Three-dimensional graphic renderings of the Orion Nebula take us inside taking us inside a grand canyon of colored gases and light. Having studied astronomy with flat printed images of the Horsehead Nebula, I never thought I would get the chance to "fly" through one of them. It was more beautiful and breathtaking than I could have dreamed. There's nothing like looking at a 3D image of your own planet to give you some perspective.

DiCaprio was unable to make the event due to filming in Japan, but producer and director Toni Myers was joined on the red carpet by astronauts Scott Altman, Michael Massimino, John Grunsfeld, Gregory Johnson, and Megan McArthur. Director of photography James Neihouse and executive producer Graeme Ferguson, also co-founder of IMAX, were in attendance as well. After teaching all those flight crews how to use the camera equipment, I had to ask, "is it easier to teach a filmmaker how to be an astronaut or an astronaut how to be a filmmaker?" Neihouse smiled and said, "I think it was easier for the astronauts."

What NASA and IMAX have collaborated to do here, with half their funding from Warner Bros., is take a technology that normally makes small actors into larger than life characters, and make our lives seem so small and delicate. As one of the astronauts from crew STS 125 put it: "whenever I forget what it was like to be up there, I watch this, and I feel it all over again."