Wonders of the Solar System [Blu-ray]

Item exactly as described and pictured in listing. Quick ship and safely packed. Easy transaction. Would do business again.

I've watched this Blu-ray discs with my 7 year old daughter, and both of us really enjoyed it. I highly recommend this to anyone who enjoys scientific documentaries.The basic structure of the film is that the professor Brian Cox introduces a certain topic about the solar system (say how Mars has been geographically dead for past oh so many million years), then discuss this by contrasting that with the Earth by traveling to sites to illustrate the topic (say a volcano in Africa). For a person like me, who already has a reasonable knowledge on the subject matter, this is a somewhat roundabout way of approaching the subject. On the other hand, for someone like my daughter, the footage of the Earth really helps her relate to this otherwise abstract and hard-to-imagine stuff that's out there. Also, to be fair, those Earth scenes are quite gorgeous on their own --- after all, this is BBC we are talking about!I also enjoyed Brian Cox as the narrator. You can see that he's genuinely excited about all that he talks about and sees, and that makes you happy. It felt real and sincere, but not over the top. His enthusiasm is contagious. It made my eyes swell up from time to time.Now, I suppose this focus on scenes on the Earth is also a reflection of a real challenge in a film like this, namely that there just aren't that many *actual* pictures of those celestial bodies, let alone videos! And I think this is where the film is a bit weak. Of the precious few actual photographs taken by spacecrafts and rovers on Mars, the film chooses to show most of them by printing them out in papers and have Brian point to them in his fingers. I wish I could have seen them in larger resolutions up close.The other thing that I think the film could have done better is to convey the astronomical (literally!) time and distance that we are talking about. Let's take distance for example --- if you've taken a trans-atlantic or trans-pacific flight, you should have the gut-feeling sense of how unimaginably large the Earth is, yet its diameter is "mere" 8,000 miles. Sun, on the other hand, has a diameter of 800,000 miles. That's a difference between a quarter coin and the height of an adult human being. But yet the distance between Sun and Earth is more like 80,000,000 miles (aka 1AU.) That is, if you imagine the solar system on your desk, Sun & Earth 3 feet apart, then the size of the Earth is only about the thickness of a human hair! And oh, did I tell you that the nearest star is 270,000AU away? That's just bat-s*** insane!!Yet the film, in an attempt to show more in screen, fails to do justice to this ridiculous vastness of the Universe. I'd have really loved to see the Google Earth-ish zoom-in/zoom-out actions that actually portrayed the accurate proportions and distances of the Sun and the planets. Or when they show you a fly-by CG of the great canyon of Mars, I'd have loved to see the Manhattan island posed in to help us grasp the monumental scale of that canyon. In those computer-generated scenes, the timescale is shifted substantially too, which also has the undesirable effect of making things feel smaller (for example, when you see Jupiter zooms in, you see the pattern of the Jupiter changes rapidly, yet if you actually are on a spaceship approaching Jupiter, it'll look completely stationary.) I don't think it's just me who gets endlessly fascinated by the sheer size of these stuff, right? I wish I could have seen those.Anyway, don't let my nerd comments scare you away. I still thoroughly enjoyed this film after all. A highly recommended buy.

I am happy with this series and the Wonders of the Universe too. The videos link the cosmos to us like no other since the Cosmos by Carl Sagan. Brian Cox said that the Cosmos influenced his career choice on his seeing the series as a child. The influence is clear, at least to me, in the two series. Like Cosmos, the Wonders series link the Universe to us in a significant and personal level.If you think that the Universe and the Cosmos are hard sciences, separate and apart from our existence both in the distant past and the present, these videos will change your mind.Cox is 44, but he brings a youthful zeal to these videos that exceeds the passion for science that Carl Sagan demonstrated in his series. This helps to hold my attention and to ponder what makes him so excited that doesn't grab me the same way.The series ponders the visible universe based on physics and goes further by hinting on how the visible universe shaped our religious and philosophical thoughts down the ages. One example of this is his comment on the need by worldwide civilizations to explain birth and death. He concludes by offering his belief on life and death based and linked on the physics of the birth and death of stars.But he cleverly ignores that the scientific belief in the truth of the Laws of Physics as interpreted by the language of mathematics can be fallible. Who knows, maybe 100 or 200 years from now scientist may look back to the 21th century and smile at the misinterpretations of the Laws of Nature by our generation of scientists just like our scientists look back 100 years and smile that the best minds of the early 20th century believed that the Universe was unchanging, with no beginning, and consisted of only the Milky Way. New discoveries and advances in technology and can make the best and brightest minds look silly in hindsight.Already, physicists appear confused to me. Within my lifetime, if a scientist believed in the Big Bang theory he/she was considered a crackpot. Now, if a scientist does not believe in the Big Bang Theory he or she is considered a crackpot. But the crackpots who don't believe in the Big Bang are starting to make noise that cannot be ignored. The theory of Multi-verses, for example, is offered as an alternative to the Big Bang as an explanation for why the Universe is expanding at an accelerated rate. Maybe Hoyle was more right than wrong when he ridiculed the Big Bang theory.The fact that Cox does not go into detail on any of the above theories, I believe will give his series a longer-shelf life than the Universe Series sponsored by the Science Channel. We will have to wait 20 years or so to find out. The Sagan Cosmos series is still being offered. Now in DVD from the original VHS format to show how a well done series can have a very long shelf life indeed.Finally, the DVD and Blue ray contains scenes that were cut by the History Channel since the videos go beyond 55 minutes on average and some beyond an hour--nice to own and see the full versions.

Life...It can't be ignored. This miniseries looks at the solar system through the eyes of our many robotic cameras sent forth as human surrogates to understand our place in the solar system, indeed in the universe. It does tend to focus on the search for extraterrestrial life and the solar system's most likely candidates that could support life now, or have supported life in the past. Just as our ancestors put down the church-supported belief of a heliocentric universe, scientists today are hellbent to put down the belief that Earth is the only island in the universe that harbors life. This series does not delve into the hornet's nest of theology or philosophy, it simply puts forward the candidates for the office of extraterrestrial life. The photography and the hi-def CG animations are beautifully done and serve to put you out there as an observer of the alien worlds beyond ours. The video looks at the variety of life forms found on Earth and focusses on Earth's life that lives in the most "unearthly" conditions, than looks out into space for equally "unearthly" environments that match. A major focus of today's search for ET, is looking for Goldilocks Zones around other stars, What this video shows is that nothing is written in stone, and indeed, habitable environments are possible outside of that narrow zone just in our own solar system. What that serves to do is increase the chances life could flourish in many more places. The elements for life are common everywhere. The building blocks of life are being found in space. The spark of life has only been proven on Earth. We have a lot of work and exploration to do.

It's quite educational I watched one part on BBC and thought it would be great for the kids.

Großer Unterschied zu allen anderen Weltraumdokus, die ich so kenne: Zeigt nicht nur schöne Bilder und nennt Fakten (das gehört natürlich auch dazu, aber eben nicht ausschließlich), sondern erklärt auch, wieso bestimmte Dinge so sind wie sie sind oder wie man sie messen kann. Der Präsentator läuft die meiste Zeit auf der Erde herum und vergleicht hier befindliches (Geografie/Geologie/Klima/Wetterphänomene...) mit Dingen an anderen Orten im Sonnensystem. Dadurch, dass er aber die Zusammenhänge so schön herstellt, ist es gar kein Manko, dass man eben nicht zu 90% spektakuläre Bilder der anderen Himmelskörper sieht. Trotzdem gibt es genügend spektakuläre Bilder von außerhalb der Erde.

perfect

Amazonデビュー後、初購入が再生できない。返品の仕方がわからなかったので、ゴミ作品

"wonders of the solar system" est un DVD pur toute la famille; c'est très bien présenté et fascinant pour tout le monde - n'importe de quel age!