Outer Space

I’ve never really seen the point in labeling it “outer” space when just “space” would suffice. But redundancy is just another thing to add to the infinite list of what we don’t understand about space. This two-minute film bluntly titled “Outer Space” was astoundingly created using actual still images from NASA’s Cassini and Voyager spacecraft.

Voyagers 1 and 2 launched in 1977 and have travelled past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, exploring them all and bearing witness to the “ring gaps, moonlets, geysers, big red spots and littler red spots abound” as they made their way towards the edges of our solar system. NASA has since announced that the craft have left the “bubble” surrounding our solar system and is now in the region they call the “stagnation zone”: 11 billion miles from the sun and headed towards interstellar space. Cassini on the other hand launched in 1997 and arrived on Saturn in 2004, where it observed half-mile-wide objects colliding Saturn’s rings and leaving behind glittering trails 20 to 110 miles long. Thankfully its mission isn’t set to end until 2017 (after having been extended twice), so we can expect many more curiosity-raising videos from Cassini.