At this time a year ago, Riptide Elite Team athlete Dan MacKenzie wasn’t doing much training. Instead, he spent most of the spring of 2009 at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral and at NASA Mission Control in Houston preparing an IMAX camera to fly on the Space Shuttle on a trip to the Hubble Space Telescope. The camera, which weighed over 400 lbs and carried a full mile of film, shot 8 minutes worth of IMAX-quality 3D footage of the Shuttle astronauts as they repaired and upgraded the telescope over the course of 5 grueling spacewalks.
One year later, that 8 minutes of footage is part of a new IMAX movie, Hubble 3D, which premiered nationwide on March 19. The movie also features footage shot on previous missions to the telescope, along with 3D animations of Hubble’s images that allow the viewer to virtually travel through the stars. The film has received rave reviews and is currently playing locally at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. While Dan is happy to be back as a full-time triathlete, he is proud to have helped produce this movie and is looking forward to seeing it soon.
