[troypiggo (Troy)]

Wife and I decided to go the Sir Thomas Brisbane Planetarium on Sunday. They had a movie narrated by Tom Hanks, made by the American Natural History Museum or something like that. Movie was quite good for the most part. "Passport to the Universe" it was called. Started off with Solar System, Milky Way, then zoomed out to Virgo Local Cluster, then further out to Orion Nebula, further yet all the way out to edge of visible universe.

Interesting part was zooming into Orion Constellation, seeing the perspective of the stars forming the constellation change as you got closer to M42. They zoomed inside M42 showing the new stars forming etc.

From my limited astro knowledge, and the fact that Tom Hanks at the beginning said "this isn't an artists impression of the Universe, it is an actual representation...", and it was made by AMoNH, I guessed that the details like distance between stars, and some of the facts quoted would be "fair dinkum".

Imagine my disappointment when the movie was at the edge of the visible Universe and Tom starts looking for a black hole to find the quickest way home... we go inside and it looks like the Dr Who intro... and surprise surprise when we get out we're back in our Solar System... sigh...

There were kids there, a Scout group, supposedly to learn.