Australia’s White Spark looks Beyond the Milky Way in decade-long docuseries

The first docs in the World’s Largest Telescopes: Beyond the Milky Way project will be delivered in 2024

Australian factual indie White Spark Pictures is developing a documentary that follows the decade-long construction of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescopes.

Titled The World’s Largest Telescopes: Beyond the Milky Way, the first 2×60’ or 1×90’ instalment will be delivered in 2024, with a further two series planned.

The docuseries will chart the key milestones and discoveries of the SKA telescope project, which brings together astronomers, engineers and scientists from 16 countries to build the world’s largest network of radio telescopes, capable of seeing further into space than ever before.

The project involves the construction of hundreds of radio dishes across Southern Africa and hundreds of thousands of low-frequency antennas in Western Australia, which will enable astronomers to observe the first stars and galaxies to exist in the universe and give humanity its best-ever chance of discovering if there’s life beyond Earth.

After three decades of planning and initial construction activities around the world last year, the project is due to be completed at the end of the decade. White Spark Pictures’ docuseries will have access to the construction sites as well as the SKA Observatory’s headquarters in the UK.

White Spark Pictures’ consultant, Wild Thring Media, will launch the docuseries to broadcasters at the World Congress of Science & Factual Producers in Glasgow next week.

The series follows the prodco’s 30-minute immersive VR film Beyond the Milky Way, which is narrated by British physicist Brian Cox and takes viewers on an immersive tour of CSIRO’s Murchison Radio Astronomy Observatory, one of the Australian sites in the SKA project.

The film premiered in Australia last December and will roll out internationally over the coming months.