NASA Music Videos

The incredible video footage released by NASA always inspires me. During the shuttle missions, NASA mounted cameras to the rocket boosters which provided a vertigo-inducing view of blasting off into space and falling all the way back to Earth. I had just finished my remix of Barry Manilow’s “Everything’s Gonna Be All Right” when I first saw the video footage from one of the Discovery shuttle’s missions. Each rocket booster had two cameras attached, one facing down and one facing up, for a total of four camera angles. I synchronized the videos in a multi-cam FCP project using the yellow timecode burned into the corner of the image and edited it into a music video for my Manilow remix.

I edited another amazing NASA video for my remix of Janis Joplin’s “Move Over.” The Transit of Venus in front of the Sun is one of only two such planetary crossings — the other being the Transit of Mercury — that are visible from Earth. While transits of Mercury occur thirteen times each century, Venus transits the Sun only twice per century. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured the remarkable event on June 5, 2012 with it’s Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager, an instrument designed to study the oscillations and magnetic field of the solar surface. The video images were constructed from several wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light and a portion of the visible spectrum. The red colored sun is the 304 angstrom ultraviolet, the golden colored sun is 171 angstrom, the magenta sun is 1700 angstrom, and the orange sun is filtered visible light. 304 and 171 show the atmosphere of the sun, which does not appear in the visible part of the spectrum. The small black disc that passes horizontally through the video is our neighboring planet, Venus.