By Sean O’Kane, TheVerge, June 13, 2015 – The vast beauty of space is about to look even more beautiful on your computer screen. Starting today, NASA will offer “4K Ultra High-Definition (UHD)” videos on YouTube, taking advantage of the site’s relatively new ability to serve up 4K videos at a super smooth frame rate of 60 frames-per-second.
The first UHD video, seen above, is a (frustratingly) short tease of the beautiful moving images that are sure to come. It was posted to one of NASA’s YouTube accounts, ReelNASA, which is a home for much of the International Space Station’s video content.
While we’ve seen some 4K videos from the ISS in the past (like this gorgeous one from the ESA, or this one posted to ReelNASA earlier this week), they have typically been time lapses made from large batches of still photos, which required lots of time and editing. NASA figuring out a way to download near-realtime UHD video means the 4K content could make it to the internet much faster. Of course, many computers still struggle to support 4K video, let alone the ones running at 60fps.
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