A NASA computer animation that shows how the sun's heat drives the Earth's swirling winds and ocean currents and a series that tours the lunar surface and the evolution of the moon are the scientific visualizations selected by an annual conference that presents and publishes the best in computer graphics and technical research.

The Association for Computer Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques is known as SIGGRAPH and is widely considered the most prestigious forum of its kind.

"Getting accepted into the SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival is a significant accomplishment," says Joshua Grow, SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival Chair, Los Angeles. "A piece must meet rigid guidelines to even merit consideration."

The two moon videos will be shown at SIGGRAPH's Computer Animation division. Both "Evolution of the Moon" and "Tour of the Moon" were released in honor of the first 1,000 days in orbit by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, launched in 2009.

The Earth visualization, titled "Coronal Mass Ejection and Ocean/Wind Circulation," is one of only 31 videos that will be shown in the SIGGRAPH's prestigious Electronic Theatre.

"This forum is the epitome of the convergence between computer graphics technology and storytelling," says Horace Mitchell of NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio (SVS). "We're very excited to have these visualizations chosen for presentation at SIGGRAPH."

The Earth video is an excerpt from an immersive 24-minute, ultra-high resolution fulldome show called "Dynamic Earth: Exploring Earth's Climate Engine."

The show is a joint production of the SVS at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., Spitz Creative Media in Chadds Ford, Pa., the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Colo., and Thomas Lucas Productions in Ossining, N.Y.

The 2012 SIGGRAPH conference and exhibition takes place from August 5 to 9 at the Los Angeles Convention Center, Calif.