
02 Jan 2018

The Real T Rex with Chris Packham
A documentary examining what the Tyrannosaurus Rex was really like - both appearance and behaviour - using the recent palaeontological and zoological research.
The Search Begins
What forms might life take in the Solar System and beyond? In the Academy's newest original planetarium show, see how a deeper understanding of Earth might help us locate other living worlds, light years away.

Narrator (voice)

02 Jan 2018

A documentary examining what the Tyrannosaurus Rex was really like - both appearance and behaviour - using the recent palaeontological and zoological research.

24 Jul 2021

Part of the Almost Famous series. Jocelyn Bell was a graduate student at Cambridge in 1967 when she pushed through the skepticism from her superiors to make one of the greatest astrophysical discoveries of the twentieth century. While Jocelyn was belittled and sexually harassed by the media, the Nobel Prize was awarded to her professor and his boss.

06 Oct 2017

The first feature from Alison McAlpine is a dialogue with the heavens—in this case, the heavens above the Andes and the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, where she alights on the desert- and mountain-dwelling astronomers, fishermen, miners, and cowboys who live their lives with reverence and awe for the skies.

20 Sep 2021

A documentary telling the remarkable human story of Stephen Hawking. For the first time, the personal archives and the testimonies of his closest family reveal both the scale of Hawking's triumphs and the real cost of his disability and success.

01 Jan 2007

Cave paintings and lunar calendars exist in the caves and remains of prehistoric hunters studied recently. What if Prehistoric Man were clever enough to develop in depth scientific knowledge? As unlikely as it may seem, new data tend to prove that Prehistoric Man actually invented Astronomy!

28 Aug 2021

Billions of years ago, Venus may have harbored life-giving habitats similar to those on the early Earth. Today, Earth's twin is a planet knocked upside down and turned inside out. Its burned-out surface is a global fossil of volcanic destruction, shrouded in a dense, toxic atmosphere. Scientists are now unveiling daring new strategies to search for clues from a time when the planet was alive.

06 Sep 1996

A documentary of insect life in meadows and ponds, using incredible close-ups, slow motion, and time-lapse photography. It includes bees collecting nectar, ladybugs eating mites, snails mating, spiders wrapping their catch, a scarab beetle relentlessly pushing its ball of dung uphill, endless lines of caterpillars, an underwater spider creating an air bubble to live in, and a mosquito hatching.

11 Jun 2025

For over three decades, NASA and an international team of scientists and engineers pushed the limits of technology, innovation, and perseverance to build and launch the James Webb Space Telescope, the most powerful space observatory ever created. Cosmic Dawn brings audiences behind the scenes with the Webb film crew, and never-before-heard testimonies revealing the real story of how this telescope overcame all odds.

10 Sep 1962

A film about astronomy which also happens to show views of the ancient city of Winchester, before focussing on a particular house in the suburbs with its own observatory.

23 Sep 2000

This feature-length documentary is a portrait of eclipse chasers, people for whom solar eclipses - among nature's more spectacular phenomena – are a veritable obsession. The film follows 4 of them as they travel incredible distances to witness the last total eclipse of the millennium as it sweeps eastward across Europe to India. At various points along the way enthusiasts Alain Cirou in France, Paul Houde in Austria, Olivier Staiger in Germany and Debasis Sarkar in India offer their impressions of the historic event.

01 Jan 2017

Before the joint NASA/ESA Cassini-Huygens mission, humanity only knew what had been learned, decades earlier, with the previous limited, rapid "fly-by" Pioneer and Voyager missions. Cassini-Huygens spent more than 13 years in wildly varied orbits around Saturn, allowing the spacecraft to pass near many of its moons, as well as execute a soft-landing of its Huygens lander on the moon Titan. By mission end, it accumulated a mountain of imagery and scientific data that will continue to be studied for years to come. This film is a testament to the amazing efforts of the scientists who planned and executed the mission. It combines breathtaking images, movies, and a variety of animations to take the viewer into Saturn's complex system of rings and moons, as well as stepping viewers through some of the more exciting scientific discoveries made over the course of the elaborately complex mission.

18 Oct 2025

A dinosaur-obsessed teen and his filmmaker father travel the world interviewing paleontologists about the latest discoveries, tracking down the crew of Jurassic Park, digging up 150-million-year-old bones, and meeting dino fanatics of all walks of life.

01 Jan 2004

Travel to ancient Egypt to see how science was used to tell time, make a workable calendar, and align huge buildings. You'll learn about the connection the ancient Egyptians felt with the stars and various astronomical phenomena, and experience some of the most spectacular temples and tombs of the ancient world recreated in all of their original splendor. Telly Award winner. Narrated by John Rhys-Davies, of the Indiana Jones films and The Lord of the Rings films.

01 Nov 2015

The film features amazing scenes of places never before seen gathered by key space missions that culminated with groundbreaking discoveries in 2015. It features a spectacular flight though the great cliffs on comet 67P, a close look at the fascinating bright "lights" on Ceres, and the first ever close ups of dwarf binary planet Pluto/Charon and its moons.

09 Jun 2014

Before the internet. Before social media. Before breaking news. The victims of Thalidomide had to rely on something even more extraordinary to fight their corner: Investigative journalism. This is the story of how Harold Evans fought and won the battle of his and many other lives.

01 Jan 1999

Chaco Canyon, located in northwest New Mexico, is perhaps the only site in the world constructed in an elaborate pattern that mirrors the yearly cycle of the sun and the 19-year cycle of the moon. How did an ancient civilization, with no known written language, arrange its buildings into a virtual celestial calendar, spanning an area roughly the size of Ireland?

09 Jan 2006

In this two-part Channel 4 series, Professor Richard Dawkins challenges what he describes as 'a process of non-thinking called faith'. He describes his astonishment that, at the start of the 21st century, religious faith is gaining ground in the face of rational, scientific truth. Science, based on scepticism, investigation and evidence, must continuously test its own concepts and claims. Faith, by definition, defies evidence: it is untested and unshakeable, and is therefore in direct contradiction with science. In addition, though religions preach morality, peace and hope, in fact, says Dawkins, they bring intolerance, violence and destruction. The growth of extreme fundamentalism in so many religions across the world not only endangers humanity but, he argues, is in conflict with the trend over thousands of years of history for humanity to progress to become more enlightened and more tolerant.

21 Jan 2023

They have no roots, no seeds, no flowers, but mosses show immense survival capacities and can suspend their biological activity for long periods. Today, researchers are exploring the exceptional resistance of these archaic organisms. British ecologists have even resurrected a "zombie" moss that has been trapped in the permafrost for 1,500 years. Associated with decay and disliked in Europe, mosses are deified in Japan. With 25,000 species worldwide, bryophytes - their scientific name - are the seat of real ecosystems, and can develop in inhospitable landscapes, through an extravagant reproduction cycle.

29 Sep 2017

An incredible travel through space and time between the walls of the Paris Observatory, which is celebrating its 350th birthday. Place of discoveries such as speed of light or Neptune’s existence, it is still today one of the oldest operating observatories and the greatest hub in the world for astronomy and astrophysics researches, second only to Harvard.
The BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Ben Gernon, performs Gustav Holst’s masterpiece, The Planets, at the Barbican, 100 years after its composition. Professor Brian Cox introduces each movement against a backdrop of the very latest in planetary imagery.