Coming to an IMAX theatre near you soon is this astonishing 3D movie film from NASA.

Served up in delicious high definition 3D, the film promises to take viewers on a, “journey through distant galaxies to explore the grandeur and mysteries of our celestial surroundings.”

NASA IMAX 3D movie features astonishing Hubble repair footageEven better, there’s some breathtaking footage capturing plucky astronauts embarking on five long spacewalks to fix the Hubble telescope.

The astronauts were trained to use the washing machine-sized IMAX camera in NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab over the course of eight months

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The newly souped-up Hubble telescope is acting as something of a time machine that allows scientists to see galaxies as they were billions of years ago. Hubble captured images in September and October that have been stitched together to show 7,500 galaxies stretching back through most of the universe’s history.

“With the rejuvenated Hubble and its new instruments, we are now entering unchartered territory that is ripe for new discoveries,” said Garth Illingworth of the University of California and leader of the survey team. “The deepest-ever, near-infrared view of the universe has now been combined with the deepest-ever optical image to push back the frontiers of the searches for the first galaxies and to explore their nature.”

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Star Death is A Violent Thing Especially when it’s ripped apart by a middleweight black hole. X-ray: NASA/CXC/UA/J. Irwin et al. Optical: NASA/STScI

We know that super-massive black holes can devour stars, and we know that stellar-mass black holes born of collapsing stars often anchor at the center of galaxies, but the elusive middleweight black hole is more theory than knowledge. While scientists have long thought they are hiding out there, hard evidence of their existence has been hard to come by. But NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, in conjunction with data from the Magellan telescopes, has captured what looks like the guts of a white dwarf star after being ripped apart by an intermediate-mass black hole.

Peering into the globular cluster at the center of elliptical galaxy NGC 1399 — 65 million light years from Earth — a burst of bright light can be seen above and left of center. Chandra’s image (the shot above is composite, with X-ray light in blue laid over a background snapped by Hubble) shows that the bright emission of light is an ultraluminous X-ray source (ULX). ULXs are a rare class of objects that emit more X-rays than stars but less than the supermassive black holes at the center of quasars. Exactly what makes up a ULX source remains a mystery, but it’s been suggested they are mid-sized black holes with masses somewhere between hundreds and thousands of times that of our sun.

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