After years of wanting to be a train engineer, my son suddenly switched his allegiance to space, announcing he will instead be an astronaut when he grows up. The catalyst was Hidden Universe 3D, an IMAX film now playing at the Science Museum. Never mind that the people in the film are not astronauts but astronomers, my five-year-old was captivated by the enormous images of the surface of Mars, exploded stars, and galaxies far far away.
The Earth-bound action takes place in the Atacama desert of Chile, a remote, near-uninhabitable, and nearly rain-free landscape. No rain means clear skies, and that plus high altitude and a lack of brightly lit cities make it a great spot for the Paranal Observatory, which hosts the most powerful telescopes in the world. Our family’s firm favourite was the VLT—the Very Large Telescope—which sounds as though it were named by a child, or maybe Roald Dahl. The VLT not only tracks stars moving around the black hole at the centre of our galaxy, it also shoots lasers up into the night sky, 60 miles up. The purpose is to create a fixed point for the telescope, to counter the distortion of Earth’s atmosphere, but my kids (whose father bought them a laser pointer for Christmas) just thought the laser looked cool.
Even the hotel-like building for the astronomers is groovy, with an indoor garden and moist air to help the astronomers recover from the arid outside. (The film’s website points out it’s the kind of biosphere that could be built should we ever colonise another planet.) My husband was amused to recognise the building as a Bond-villain hide-out from Quantum of Solace.
Other highlights include flying over the surface of Mars and the adorable Curiosity Rover, looking like an extra from WALL-E. The various nebulae are mesmerising, with strange shapes that still look eerily familiar and hence have names like the Crab and the Cats Eye. The “Hidden” bit of the title refers to the power of the telescopes to see deep into the darkest corners of the universe, including to “the birthplace of stars”, a romantic idea with a less-than-romantic name, the N90 Nebula, found a mind-boggling 200,000 light years away.
As for ages that might appreciate this film, my seven-year-old daughter loved it and remained captivated for the duration (about 40 minutes). While it did inspire a change in profession for my five-year-old, he eventually stage-whispered, “I’m getting bored of this.” Luckily this was only five minutes from the end, so he was able to hang in there.
Hidden Universe 3D IMAX is playing at the Science Museum, according to its website, through the beginning of April.
About the author:
Elisa moved to London seven years ago from San Francisco, where, in pre-children days, she was the managing editor at Sierra magazine. She lived in Brook Green and Notting Hill before settling in Chiswick, where she lives with her book-loving daughter, train-loving son, and thickly moustachioed husband.
