We hope you didn’t miss Look Up too much while your Space Editor was up to other things during the past month. Your weekly astronomy fix is back, however, so pull up a lawn chair and dim the porch light.

Actually, our first event comes with its own chairs. Hubble 3D opens at IMAX theaters this Friday, March 19. A private world premiere event was held at the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum last Tuesday, with a screening featuring special guests, including Lori Garver, Deputy Administrator of NASA, and most of the STS-125 crew that stars in the film.

Let’s not mince words: this movie is mindblowing. Hubble 3D not only takes you on a ride with the three main astronaut crews responsible for getting the Hubble Space Telescope up and running (in 1990, 1992, and 2009), but it actually takes you through space to the galaxy fields and nebulae we can see through Hubble’s eye. The telescope’s ability to resolve fine detail from millions of light-years away has allowed scientists (and probably a lot of graphic designers) to create fantastic 3D images — a flight through space to the Orion Nebula, with its nursery of baby stars nestled inside, bursting away interstellar material as they grow, is something out of Carl Sagan’s dreams.

This is no lame-ass “reality-based” James Cameron 3D, this is full-on Captain EO style, duck-or-reach-out-and-touch-it 3D — and let’s face it, that’s what we really want to see when we put on those stupid-looking glasses. If you’ve never seen a space shuttle launch (or even if you have), Hubble 3D might be one of the best, closest experiences you’ll ever have. Multiple cameras from the tower and surrounding launchpad capture the full ground-shaking experience of the launch as the exhaust and steam blow right over you and the roar explodes from the speakers.