"The reconstruction of OUR HEAVENLY BODIES is based on material from two sources." "An original tinted and toned nitrate positive print 1,714 m long, with Swedish and Finnish intertitles from the Helsinki Film Archive and a nitrate dupe negative 497 m long with German flash titles from the Deutshe Kinemathek in Berlin." "The text of the missing German intertitles was obtained from a German censorship card in the Swedish Film Archive." "The reconstruction of the film is nearly complete." "Only a few shots are missing." "Newly created intertitles are in gothic script." "And new act titles are in the Hobo font." "Munich Film Museum" "OUR HEAVENLY BODIES" "In portraying the cosmic movements, years millennia and millions of years have been compressed into seconds." "For 'A thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday' Psalm 90" "ACT ONE" "ON THE ROAD TO TRUTH" "The greatest joy of the thinking man is to have explored the explorable." "And to revere in silence that which cannot be explored." "Goethe" "The human spirit has always pondered the riddles of the skies." "The most ancient body of astronomical knowledge comes from Babylon... and from China." "For early antiquity, the Earth was a circular disk floating on the ocean." "However the observation that only the tops of distant objects are visible attested to a curvature of the Earth's surface." "During lunar eclipses the Earth's shadow is always circular." "Only round objects cast a circular shadow in every position." "Therefore the Earth must be spherical." "The Earth was supposed to be the unmoving centre of the Universe, around which the celestial sphere and the fixed stars revolved." "Only the sun, the moon and a few planets moved among the fixed stars." "The Greek astronomers were the first to compile these centuries old observations into one system." "And around 150 A.D. Ptolemy taught..." "The planets move in circles, the centres of which revolve around the Earth." "The orbits of the Moon, Mercury, the Sun and Venus, according to the Ptolemaic view." "This teaching was accepted for nearly one and a half millennia, till a German canon banished the sacred fallacy in 1500 A.D." "Nicolous Copernicus." "The book that was published as he lay dying," "The Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies," "placed the sun at the centre of the Universe." "The Earth, a star amongst stars, revolves around the Sun with the other planets." "100 years later Kepler of Wurttemberg discovered... that the orbits of the planets are not circles but ellipses with the Sun as one of their focal points." "But these ellipses are almost circular." "At this point in time, a coincidence that would be of great significance for astronomy facilitated the study of the starry skies." "Thus did the spectacle maker Lipperhey of Middleburg in Holland invent the telescope." "One of the first successes of the telescope was the discovery of Jupiter's larger moon by the Italian Galileo Galilei... who was led to the teachings of Copernicus by his observations." "In the year 1633 he was forced to renounce these teachings, not yet accepted by the church, as heresy." "I Galileo Galilei, from Florence, 70 years old, personally arraigned before tribunal, swear by the holy gospel which I have before my eyes that I give up the false opinion of Nicolous Copernicus according to which the Sun is the centre of the world and immoveable." "And the Earth is not the centre and moves." "Despite the false recantation, he remained true to his conviction." "And according to legend is said to have declared..." "It moves all the same!" "The telescope, meanwhile perfected, has shed new light on the form and nature of the heavenly bodies." "This was how the Dutchman Huygens found the truth about the form of Saturn's rings." "The science of astronomy took a great step forward in about 1670 when the Englishman Isaac Newton discovered the laws governing movement in space." "Devoted observation of simple natural events... brought him to the conviction that gravity, the same force that causes the apple to fall to the ground, binds all heavenly bodies together." "Only one force acts on the falling fruit" " Earth's gravity." "If a second propulsive force should affect a body, for example a projectile then it can attain a certain distance from the point of origin, before falling to Earth." "If one could give this projectile an initial speed of about 8 km/s it would no longer fall to Earth at all, but would orbit it, like a little moon." "Likewise two forces affect every planet." "Gravity tries to pull the planets to the Sun..." "Against which centrifugal force tried to spin it away from the Sun." "The happy medium is the elliptical orbit." "If gravity was suddenly to weaken, everything would be spun off the Earth's surface." "A complete cessation of gravity would destroy the Earth." "Recent times are rich in the results of astronomical research." "The greatest sensation was Einstein's Theory of Relativity, which explores the relationship between motion, space and time." "And for the testing of which, a special institute was set up near Potsdam." "The science of astronomy has thus united all nations in a common task, through centuries of labour." "However the sight of the starry skies constantly brings new revelations, not only to those who think, but also to those who feel." "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe:" "The starry heavens above me and the moral law within me." "Emanuel Kant" "END OF ACT ONE." "ACT TWO" "THE NIGHT SKY" "And God said:" "And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heavens." "To give light upon the Earth." "Genesis 1" "THE MOON." "One eightieth the size of the Earth, is particularly noteworthy for the constant changes in its shape." "from full to half, to new and back to full moon." "Like the other heavenly bodies the Moon rises in the East." "But due to its own fast movement around the Earth it changes its position relative to the stars." "This is why it does not always appear for us at the same time." "As a full moon, it rises at sunset." "But in its last quarter, not until midnight." "The Moon attracts the terrestrial bodies of water that face it." "And this causes the tides, ebb and flow." "A lunar eclipse is a striking spectacle of nature, which arises when the Earth's shadow falls across the Moon." "It becomes darker, but not quite invisible." "Even today, some primitive peoples see the Earth's shadow as an evil spirit, swallowing the moonlight." "A dance of joy after the evil spirit subsides." "'Do you know how many little stars there are in the wide blue sky?" "'" "Only about 5,800 fixed stars are visible to the naked eye." "One of our modern giant telescopes such as the reflecting telescope of the Berlin Observatory... can by contrast show many millions of points of light." "The brightest fixed stars appear to us in certain groups." "The constellations." "The best known is The Great Bear or The Big Dipper." "The connecting line between the last two stars points to the Pole Star, which is always in the North." "And around which the entire firmament seems to revolve." "The most important constellations of the northern skies can easily be found from these points." "The 'Little Bear'." "Cassiopeia." "Andromeda." "The Lyre." "The Swan." "Perseus." "The Charioteer." "Also well known are The Pleiades." "The 'Seven Sisters' that shine in the long winter nights." "Orion too, is only visible to us in the Winter half year." "Comets, Meteors and Falling Stars." "In the Middle Ages, comets were considered portents of evil" "Especially of war." "These hobgoblins of the firmament, coming from worlds away, are at first barely visible to the naked eye." "The solar heat drives quantities of gas from their cores, which we perceive as the comets' tails." "The greatest comet length so far measured is 250,000,000 km." "These tails always turned away from the sun vanish again when the comets wander into the uncharted remoteness of space." "Some comets split." "And these pieces break up into many smaller chunks." "This comet debris is seen by us as a shower of falling stars when it crosses the Earth's orbit." "Most recently in 1866." "Individual falling stars" " Meteors, can hit the Earth's surface, and are the only messengers from the sky that reach us." "It is an ancient popular belief that what you wish for as a star falls, will come true." "On Christmas Eve." "Go to sleep children." "Santa Claus will come tomorrow." "The Christmas Star, which led the Magi to Bethlehem is thought by some researchers to have been a comet." "When they saw the star they rejoiced with exceeding, great joy." "When they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother" "END OF ACT TWO." "ACT THREE" "THE STAR OF DAY" "While the Earth remaineth seed time and harvest and cold and heat and Summer and Winter and day and night shall not cease." "Genesis 8." "The rising Sun outshines the light of all other stars." "Even the brilliant Sun is not spotless." "The details of the sun are especially clear when one photographs it in a certain yellow light." "The entire solar surface then appears pitted." "The individual sunspots are many times greater than the entire Earth." "From the regular progressive movement of these spots one concludes that the sun completes a revolution in about 25 days." "The cause of the spots is taken to be tremendous storms on the solar surface." "Their influence on the Earth is shown in the way their changing number also changes the frequency of the Northern lights." "Most atmospheric conditions on Earth are dependant on the Sun." "A solar eclipse takes place when the Moon comes between the Earth and the Sun" "A total solar eclipse is extremely rare anywhere on Earth." "Thus the next total solar eclipse will not be visible in Central Germany until the year 1999." "In the earliest times, astronomers could already calculate a solar eclipse in advance." "Among the people however, it called forth fear and horror." "The Sun's casing, the corona, normally overwhelmed by its own light can be seen when the radiant disc is covered by the Moon." "The protuberances also become visible." "Quantities of gas, thrusting upwards to heights calculated to reach 700,000 km." "The Sun dominates all life on Earth." "It is the clock of clocks," "Its rising and setting divides light and darkness for us." "It's varying height, over or under the horizon produces times of day for us." "All places that lie on the same meridian step out of darkness into sunlight at the same time." "When the Sun is at its highest point..." "After half a revolution of the Earth we gradually turn away from the Sun." "On the dark side of the Earth." "In different parts of the Earth that do not lie on the same meridian, day breaks at different times." "In Europe, one arises from slumber... when it is already lunch time in China." "At the same time, Papua in the South Seas, goes to rest." "And the nightly show of lights flickers in New York." "As a result of the curvature of the Earth's surface, the Sun's rays hit the equator at a steeper angle than at the poles." "But the steeper a ray of sunlight, the smaller the area that it illuminates and warms..." "And the shorter its way through the heat absorbing layers of the atmosphere." "That is why it is warmer at the equator..." "Than at the poles." "The inclination of the Earth's axis, against its orbit leads to the Sun's rays falling in the same area, sometimes steeply, sometimes inclined." "This is how the seasons come about." "When the North Pole steps out of the Winter night, and reaches the edge of the light, the Spring begins for us." "Spring." "When the North Pole leans towards the Sun two thirds of the Northern hemisphere are always in sunlight." "Here it is Summer." "The North Pole gradually turns away from the Sun." "It becomes Autumn." "When the entire Northern half of the Earth has turned away from the Sun, with the North Pole," "Then nearly two thirds of the Northern Hemisphere are always in darkness." "Then it is their Winter." "END OF ACT THREE" "ACT FOUR" "A FLIGHT TO THE MOON" "And God made two great lights." "The greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night." "Genesis 1" "The mysteriously twinkling stars awaken in us the craving to know more of them than we may discern from Earth." "An audacious fantasy vessel is to carry us across still untraversable distances." "All clear for take off." "Transported by terrific electrical energies... the spacecraft overcomes the Earth's gravity." "We need to rush through many trillions of kilometres." "With increasing speed we depart from our home planet." "At 1,000 km altitude, we have gone beyond the atmosphere." "The temperature gauge has dropped to -273 Celsius." "According to precise physical calculations this temperature is constant throughout space." "In spite of the dark sunlight we can now see the stars shimmering in the dark sky." "because no atmospheric layer is beaming the sunlight back." "Looking back, we see the Earth already vanishing..." "Because we're approaching the moon, which orbits the Earth at a distance of 400,000 km, which is equal to thirty times the Earth's diameter." "We notice no rotation because the same side of the Moon always faces the Earth." "Here we shall experience a lunar day." "Equal to 29 1/2 Earth days, but shown here in just a few seconds." "The Sun rises higher." "The deep valleys fill with light..." "But here too, the Sun must set." "A bright star hangs in the sky." "The Earth." "It turns on its axis 29 1/2 times during a lunar day." "ACT FIVE" "THE SUN'S CHILDREN" "There dwells a life in every star With brother spheres it rolls afar" "It's self elected radiant way Goethe" "We set out on our journey through space." "And first visit the Earth's siblings, in the order of their distance from the Sun." "Whilst the Earth revolves around the Sun in 365 days," "Mercury, the nearest planet to the Sun, needs only 88 days." "Some scientists are convinced that this planet always faces the Sun with the same side." "If this observation is accurate, then the hot Sun shines permanently on one side making the landscape a lifeless desert." "The narrow transitional belt could have earthlike conditions." "On the night side however, deathly cold would rule." "We approach Venus, the surface of which is always enveloped in cloud and invisible to us." "As we fly by, we see the Earth and its orbiting moon in the distance." "And on the other side, 227 million km from the Sun, we arrive at our neighbour in space, the much vaunted Mars." "In spite of our close proximity, we know very little about it." "Because... even the largest telescope shows only a few unclear features of its surface." "We know that Mars has Summer and Winter from the white patches that form at its poles in the Martian Winter... and melt again in the Spring." "The Italian Schiaparelli and other scientists thought they had seen canals on the surface of Mars, which due to their rectilinearity they took to be the work of intelligent beings." "But this seems to be an illusion." "Upon landing, we notice that Martian gravity is only one third of that of Earth, because Mars is correspondingly smaller than the Earth." "With our muscles we can perform peculiar movements here." "We can throw heavy rocks with unimaginable ease." "A soaring feeling." "Five metre leaps of joy." "Between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, tiny heavenly bodies revolve around the Sun." "The planetoids, of which we know 1,000." "In a realistic depiction of the proportions, the planets would seem like dots and the planetoids would not even be visible therefore all sizes have been greatly exaggerated." "The lack of an atmosphere makes these dwarf world uninhabitable." "Otherwise we might experience our childhood story of Lilliput." "Earth's big brother, Jupiter, orbits besides these little ones." "Its four large moons, its satellites, can be seen from Earth with only a small telescope." "The disappearance of the moons in Jupiter's shadow and their own shadows on the planet are an exciting spectacle for us." "On Jupiter, where the gravity is greater than that on Mars, each of us would have to carry a body weight two and a half times normal." "If people could live on Jupiter, which is impossible as its surface has not quite cooled down, their muscle power would be far superior to that of Earthlings." "The journey goes on, to the ring bedecked Saturn." "Saturn's rings are made of countless solid particles that orbit the planet and only from a distance seem to be a contiguous formation." "After penetrating the cloud cover, we behold the rings as an enormous white rainbow." "One more look from Saturn's seventh moon (Themis) at the glorious spectacle of the planet orbited by its six inner moons." "Here too there is day and night." "for the Sun shines this far, though not as brightly." "As on Earth's moon, the shadows move on Saturn's which dwindles to a crescent." "Uranus accompanied by its four satellite moons... is so far from the Sun, that the latter appears merely as a bright star." "Four billion kilometres from the Sun!" "And still in its orbit." "Before us is the most distant planet yet known." "Neptune, which takes four hours for sunlight to reach." "To Earth it takes only eight minutes." "We can distinctly see a moon orbiting it." "The discovery of Neptune is a great accomplishment for astronomy." "Irregularities in the movement of Uranus led to the conclusion that another planet was present nearby." "the position of which was calculated in 1846 by the Frenchman Leverrier." "In fact, the German Galle found the planet a few days later less than two full moons away from the calculated position." "We have measured a whole world." "But all the planets together are only a tiny part of the central star, the Sun." "And it in turn is only like a grain of sand in the desert compared to the number of heavenly bodies." "END OF ACT FIVE" "ACT SIX" "AT THE GATES OF INFINITY" "World spirit come, our spirits firing" "Forever more to thee aspiring" "We but obey our nature's call Goethe" "We are now outside the solar system, in the world of the fixed stars." "The Sun's gravity is no longer noticeable." "Weightless, we can move as we wish." "There is no up or down any more." "At first, still uncertain..." "One soon grows accustomed to the lack of gravity." "As gravity is absent, we have the ability to float freely." "Forward we go towards the luminous belt of the Milky Way." "Formed by the farthest stars of our system." "Glowing suns whiz past us at tremendous speed." "Only a mist." "So thin, that we can fly through it, unharmed." "We are 95 trillion kilometres away from the Earth." "What is happening at home?" "We point the television to the Earth." "But that was ten years ago." "Of course, because in spite of its speed of 300,000 km/s the light from Earth needs 10 years to rush the 95 trillion kilometres here." "Are we really traveling at 300,000 km/s?" "Not quite right now." "But let's speed up." "Strange, the same images again." "But reversed." "Now we are flying at twice the speed of light." "So the same beam of light that just overtook us, is slipping behind us." "And we must see everything in reverse order." "For us time is going backwards." "Something dangerous?" "We nearly smashed into a star." "Having come so close, that its gravity nearly pulled us off course." "Now, back to our own environment." "We notice an unusually elongated constellation among the fixed stars." "A double star, confirming Newton's teachings." "Two suns that revolve around each other." "Here, the secret of the changing star Algol, is also unveiled to us." "A darker companion, regularly once every revolution eclipses the bright main star." "Here we are already some 3,500 light years 32,000 trillion kilometres away from the Earth." "From this immense distance, we no longer see the events of the recent past on Earth, but those of remote antiquity." "Something threatening approaches us." "A star cluster, through which we pass." "Will it go on like this for ever?" "We leave the last stars of The Milky Way behind us." "Space becomes ever emptier." "Nothingness yawns threateningly before us." "Even the boldest fantasies have now reached their limits." "So back we go." "END OF ACT SIX" "ACT SEVEN" "WAXING AND WANING IN SPACE" "In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth." "Genesis 1" "The bright stars in the sky seem immobile and everlasting..." "And yet precise observations have shown that the fixed stars too, are not fixed at all but have their own movement." "So for example, The Great Bear constellation didn't look the same 300,000 years ago... as it does now... and will different again in another 300,000 years." "As in the cycle of all creation so in the existence of worlds, there is also birth, old age and death." "An approximate idea of this development in space can be gotten from drops of oil rotating in water." "These at first flatten themselves... then become discoid... or spiral." "And smaller drops finally separate themselves into independent entities." "Thus one can imagine for example, the formation of the solar system from a primordial nebula, as the gradual separation of children from their common mother." "A disorderly gaseous mass takes on a spiral form, through rotation." "Points consolidate themselves in the spiral... which then separate themselves as independent planets." "In their youth, the stars are composed of gas." "The gases solidify into a core, which in the case of giant stars can reach a temperature of over 20,000 degrees Celsius." "Through radiation in space they gradually cool off..." "And a firm crust then forms on the outer surface." "But the crust is still thin." "And volcanoes burst through the hard surface." "and spew liquid fire onto the outer surface." "Even today volcanoes discharge molten masses into the daylight." "Wind and water have gnawed away at the Earth's surface." "In life's tentative attempts to develop, bizarre forms have come and gone..." "Until the face of the Earth attained the form familiar to us today." "And what will the Earth's fate be?" "Death by freezing?" "When the Sun loses its warming, life giving energy..." "But every star is threatened by another danger." "Two heavenly bodies can collide." "The biblical quotation might thus be fulfilled:" "And there shall be signs in the Sun, and in the Moon and in the stars." "Men's hearts failing them for fear." "And for looking after those things which are coming on the Earth." "For the powers of heaven shall be shaken." "And yet, the old Earth still stands firm." "And man securely on it." "But above us the stars maintain their orbits in eternal harmony according to unbending laws." "No being can to nothing fall The everlasting lives in all" "Sustain yourself in joy with life Life is eternal, there are laws" "To keep the living treasure's cause With which the worlds are rife" "Goethe" " Legacy" "THE END" "Subtitles:" "Corvusalbus and Agape"