Imagine standing on top of Olympus Mons, a volcano that rises 30,400 metres above the red planes of Mars. All the ground below would curve away in every direction. Or journey to Triton and observe its nitrogen geysers sprouting eight kilometres into the air.
This is not Star Wars, but The Planets (Pearl, 8.30pm), as reconstructed by the BBC, brought to us as a result of 50 years of space exploration and the technical artistry of its computer graphics team. The essential guide to the planets and the sun they circle begins tonight, with stunning images of what we would see if we could travel beyond our moon.
Over the next eight weeks the story of how our solar system was created and explored will unfold, along with its wonderously varied nature and final destiny. By the end of the series we can all be expert planetary astronomers.
The series begins with the accretion theory, which explains how it all started. This was first guessed at by the 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant but not pursued until the 1950s, by the Russian scientist Victor Safronov. Within the swirling dust cloud that accompanied the creation of our star, minute forces like gravity and electrostatics caused grains of dust to gather together to form rough pebbles, which clumped together to form rocks and embryonic planets - or 'planetisimals'.
The series shows what space explorations have discovered since the first rockets were launched in World War II. It could have used footage sent back from the probes that have flown past every planet except Pluto. But these images were deemed too static, so instead the producers have turned to computer graphics to recreate geographically accurate pictures, based on the detailed maps and databases of Nasa.