A balloon the size of a football stadium will lift the BLAST telescope array above Earth's atmosphere to photograph deep space.
The science is hands on and way out there in two recent documentaries just out on DVD:
“BLAST!”: The title stands for “balloon-bourne large aperture submillimeter telescope” which, I’ll grant you, doesn’t sound all that sexy.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
Paul Devlin’s documentary is about a group of astrophysicists who hope to photograph deep space by using a massive balloon — it’s the size of a football stadium — to lift a sophisticated telescope above our atmosphere. There it can drift for several days, taking pictures of parts of our universe never before seen.
Most of the team members — professionals and grad students — hail from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Toronto.
Devlin’s film follows months of preparation as the telescope is hand crafted. Then his cameras tag along (more…)
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