This film is a precursor of Carl Sagan's "Cosmos", a summary of what is known about outer space, from the ancient astonomer's ideas, to the best understanding at the time of what stars are, even including an imaginary voyage to the planets and stars.
The production values were absolute cutting-edge at the time, in fact, a lot of the special effects are superior to that of most Western fantasy films of the 1950's.
At the time, most viewers would never have seen anything like it -- and have known little of the science that it explains.  Most of that science is still current.
They didn't know much about the surfaces of the planets -- that wouldn't come until the 1960's.  And they didn't distinguish the milky way galaxy from the universe -- at the time it was controversial -- only in the 1930's did Hubble prove that the spiral nebulae were themselves composed of stars lying far outside of the Milky Way.

Anybody interested in the history of film,or in the development of theories of the cosmos, should certainly see this film

The flicker and jerkiness of the original films is largely cleaned up in the DVD -- I've seen some other copies based on the original that aren't cleaned up, and I can say this DVD is much more watchable.  The musical score is fitting.

A few technical complaints about the DVD itself: the DVD "chapters" don't seem to correspond very closely to the "Acts" of the film.  The main DVD menu is slapped on top of a first title of text -- it's just sloppy.  And somehow the volume name of the DVD isn't right -- it appears as "NEW".

Thanks!