One of the single greatest advantages of the modern age of astronomy, in my opinion, is that digital images from telescopes and spacecraft -- and telescopes on spacecraft -- have been placed in the hands of everyone. It can take years of training to correctly process and interpret astronomical data, but even without that these images can be put together to make art, scenes of surpassing beauty that professional astronomers might not even think to create. Dutch video editor Sander van den Berg looked at Cassini and Voyager images, and saw beyond the raw data into the beauty of motion in them. He created a video that is stunning. Stunning. He calls it, simply, "Outer Space".

[embed width="610"]http://vimeo.com/40234826[/embed]

The events depicted take days, even weeks to play out. Yet somehow, the quick shots and fast cuts -- necessary because in many cases there really aren't very many images to play with -- add to the majesty and grandeur of what you see. I suppose that's no more paradoxical than having canvases far bigger than Earth, yet loaded with detail packed into those vast frameworks. The Universe is magnificent on every scale, both in space and time. That's one of the reasons I like working there.

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