The Awesome Wonder of Science, in One Little Video

A pair of filmmakers took an odd-looking telescope and lugged it around the streets of Los Angeles to give pedestrians an up-close view of the moon. Their reactions are then shown on video.

“Oh my God!,” exclaims one passerby after another.

It’s this universal response, and not the moon itself, that’s the subject of the work, called “A New View of the Moon.” So far it’s  garnered over a quarter of a million views and counting on YouTube.

The filmmakers, Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh, nicely capture the universal human response that’s triggered when we glimpse something so enthralling. The wonder and delight of the spectators is downright infectious. And it’s all set to Debussy’s gorgeous piece “Clair de Lune.”

Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. put it aptly:

There is something quietly profound in their awe […] So far as we’ve been able to determine, we’re out here alone. So each other is all we have. But then, it should be all we need. Overstreet’s and Gorosh’s little movie is a gentle reminder of this, a hymn to our common humanity. It is an invitation to put down the remote control once in a while. Put down the cellphone, put down the bills, stop yelling at one other. And look up.