Check out Brian May’s astronomical video!

As you know, Dr. Brian May, the excellent lead guitarist of Queen, is also an astronomer at heart.  Over ten years ago, he went back and finished his PhD in Astrophysics.  Both rock and space have always been in his blood, though the bigger money was definitely in rock.

His latest musical effort combines both his loves.  The video for his song “New Horizons” premiered on New Year’s Eve to coincide with NASA’s New Horizons probe’s flyby of Ultima Thule, the furthest celestial object the human race has ever explored.  Check out the music video:

Ultima Thule is about 4,000,000,000 miles from Earth and New Horizons flew within 2200 miles of it!  If you travel that far and get that close, you have to snap some pictures, right?  I mean, I couldn’t even go to Galena without whippin’ out the camera.  Here’s an article about the mission:  https://www.foxnews.com/science/nasa-announces-latest-discoveries-from-ultima-thule-flyby

The funny thing is that this is not May’s first time combining music and astrophysics.  If you look closely at the lyrics of his song “39” from A Night at the Opera, you’ll see that even though it sounds like it’s talking about sailing on the ocean, it’s really about taking a ship far into space.  The person singing the song gets back from his mission only to find that 100 years have gone by on Earth and he’s only a year older, because of the whole Einstein relativity thing if you travel really fast.  Check out the song and you’ll see what I mean.

That’s just part of what makes Queen fun to listen to. Four completely different personalities each taking a crack at writing gives you a real four-dimensional experience.  Again with the Einstein!