"Hubble 3D," a celebration of the orbiting space telescope and the NASA crew that gave it new life last year, provides a glimpse of how star systems looked a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. It reveals the borders of the visible universe. It drinks in the spectacle of celestial bodies born in fiery pillars of clouds.

The content is scientific. The imagery gets biblical. In fact, after Baltimore-based astronaut John Grunsfeld witnessed a positive power check on a Hubble camera he'd installed, he said, "Let there be light."

The beauty is sometimes so overwhelming and unexpected that it's equally sublime and absurd. It's fitting that "Hubble 3D" follows "Alice in Wonderland" as a 3-D live-action event at the Maryland Science Center this Friday. Lewis Carroll parodied "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" when he had the Mad Hatter recite "Twinkle Twinkle Little Bat." The universe as seen by Hubble is full of cosmic butterflies and horse's heads, and twinkling bats - great big ones.

Toni Myers, the director of "Hubble 3D," says the movie developed out of a meeting she had with Grunsfeld, now the deputy director of Space Telescope Science Institute on the Johns Hopkins University's Homewood campus.

In 2006, Grunsfeld, an astrophysicist as well as an astronaut, was a man with a two-pronged cause. First he aimed to persuade NASA to mount a full-scale makeover for the Hubble telescope. Then he hoped to pack a 3-D IMAX camera system on the space shuttle Atlantis for the whole epochal ride.

Myers and Grunsfeld reconnoitered at an Einstein Bros. Bagels shop in Houston. (Has a meeting place ever sounded quite so apt?) As Myers says, it was "one of those meetings where you write the story on a napkin in a coffee shop."

From java-stained paper, one of the mightiest IMAX films has grown. The flesh-and-metal adventure comes from the ultimate retrofit of Hubble. Launched in 1990 with a minuscule flaw in its primary mirror, Hubble received its first corrective lenses in 1993. Mission STS-125 was the fifth orbiting house call on Hubble. At one point, we watch Grunsfeld, the most space-experienced of the seven-person crew, help install a revamped wide-field camera on an extended spacewalk.

Grunsfeld's vision, right at the beginning, was to contrast brilliant space cowboys performing the equivalent of "brain surgery" with the end results of Hubble's wizardry: "Wonderful scenes of flying into spaces where planets and stars are formed." He loves the "visceral feeling" that "Hubble 3D" evokes for traveling in space and time, whether toward brave new worlds or the beginnings of the cosmos.

Now engaged in education, public outreach and strategic planning at STSI, Grunsfeld sees "Hubble 3D" as a chance to excite generations who have registered declining interest in science, technology, engineering and math. "Our space program is very important to this country technologically, but it's also very important inspirationally."

Although Myers had collaborated often with NASA and trained dozens of astronauts to film bits of previous missions, she zeroed in on Grunsfeld because he was a good friend of a trusted collaborator, Baltimore-born astronaut Marsha Ivins. "Marsha did two wonderful things," Myers says. "She introduced me to [NASA administrator] Mike Griffin and told me to sit down with John."

Griffin has been dubbed "the savior" of Hubble. After the Columbia shuttle disaster in 2003, Griffin's predecessor canceled existing plans to service Hubble and gave the telescope low priority. But Griffin, in his first year as NASA administrator, announced a new Hubble mission and proclaimed that it would go "as flawlessly as any of us can imagine." Griffin also found funds within NASA to put the camera in the flight plan.

In his office at STSI, Grunsfeld explains that for five months, from April to August of 2006, he worked full time with mission manager Chuck Shaw on the overarching narrative: "If NASA were to go back to Hubble, how could we do it and optimize the safety?" They had to answer to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board and to NASA management.

Grunsfeld recalls, "I started thinking about 'story' a great deal; that's a deliberate word. Because what we were presenting was a narrative: a technical narrative in great detail." It covered everything from the makeup of the management team to the scientific grounds for manned space flight. "This is what it is, this is how risky it is, this is how much it costs, and this is what we get for it."

He began to envision the STS-125 mission as the pinnacle of the whole Hubble saga, from the telescope's launch in 1990 to the succession of "people in suits riding to the rescue. They even happen to be white suits, like in Westerns - women and men in white suits, doing space walks to repair the telescope."

On STS-125, Grunsfeld and his fellow astronauts would imbue the telescope with unprecedented powers even as they started to prepare it for probable de-orbit in 2014.(That's when another orbiting marvel, the James Webb Space Telescope, will work in tandem with it or replace it.)

Because of IMAX, the movie is a genuine star party. For the astrophysicist-astronaut, as well as for the filmmakers, IMAX was the obvious photographic choice. Not only did this format have the size and clarity to do justice to Hubble's images, but the IMAX company had vast experience with NASA. James Niehouse, the man in charge of the cameras for "Hubble 3D," had worked on "The Dream is Alive," IMAX's initial foray into outer space 25 years ago, and then "Blue Planet," "Destiny in Space," "Mission to Mir," and "Space Station 3D." IMAX filmmakers had already captured images of Hubble's launch and first servicing mission.

At times, "Hubble 3D" turns moviegoers into star trekkers venturing through the Milky Way to Andromeda and then toward a black hole in the Virgo Cluster of galaxies. That's the work of STSI astrophysicist Frank Summers and his collaborators in the institute's imaging team. They fill out Hubble's data with information gleaned from other instruments to conjure the effect of "flying through" freshly charted segments of the cosmos.

None of this movie magic would have happened without an IMAX view of the nuts and bolts of the mission. Grunsfeld approached the Goddard Space Flight engineers to find a spot for the 700-pound IMAX 3-D camera assembly, and Goddard designed a storage slot right next to one of the new instruments, giving "Hubble 3D" its payload view of the action.

Although there was no way to maneuver the camera in space, an IBM laptop with special software enabled pilot Gregory C. Johnson to choose among lenses (30, 40 or 60 mm), select iris and focus, and stop or start the shooting efficiently - most crucial of all, since the IMAX camera carried only eight minutes' worth of film.

Putting an IMAX camera in the cabin was out of the question, so Grunsfeld asked the company to upgrade high-definition camcorders for the astronauts' use. The finished film includes footage from Canon HDV cameras, capturing casual interviews and mundane cabin moments, like a blissfully abbreviated bathroom scene. The movie also contains shots from Sony "cigar" cameras lodged in the space-walkers' helmets, closing in on Hubble installations and repairs.

The telescope circles the earth every 97 minutes (it travels at 17,045 mph to stay in orbit). Astronauts servicing it witness sunrises and sunsets every 46 minutes. Myers and company expected those sorts of quick changes. But they were at the mercy of mechanical surprises, like a stuck bolt that stymied Grunsfeld and his space-walk partner, Andrew J. Feustel - and an even more stubborn stripped bolt that his colleague, Michael Massimino, encountered two days later, in the movie's high point of suspense.

Massimino calls Grunsfeld "very steady. A really good guy to fly with. You know he's going to be worried about everything, so everything is going to be taken care of." Grunsfeld says, "I'm happier in space; it's true. If I could live the whole time in space, I would. My wife mentioned it to me after my first space mission: the smile you have on in space is nothing like I'd never seen on Earth."

Focus and enthusiasm make Grunsfeld an ideal ambassador for space travel and science.

"The space stuff in the movie was great, but after all, I was there, so for me it was like reliving good memories. But seeing that 3-D 'fly-through' of protoplanetary systems - that was really exciting. Some kids may really get it, and say, 'Wow, that's cool stuff.' "

If you go "Hubble 3D" opens Friday at the Maryland Science Center, 601 Light St. Tickets are $8. Call 410-685-2370 or go to mdsci.org for showtimes.