Inspired by the thread on most realistic depiction of spaceflight, I have an almost opposite question. For a course on astronomy, I’d like to show examples of “bad astronomy” from movies, TV shows, or other video available on the internet. I’m interested in anything of pedagogical or amusement value. Things that come to mind are Comet Kowalski in “Roxanne” which comes cruising across the sky during the closing credits. Also, I swear I saw a movie once in which they announced that they were one mile from the asteroid belt. I’d love to find a clip of that. There must be a Dracula movie in which the full moon rises at midnight. Your thoughts and hyperlinks would be much appreciated.
I think the biggest fudge in scifi cinema is distance. Even going from earth to the moon is a days long trip but they make it seem a matter of minutes or even seconds. Heck, in Star Trek they are flying past Jupiter and 10 seconds later in orbit around the earth.
I agree. The vastness of space is hard for people to comprehend and the real physics does not lend itself to fast-paced plots. For the sake of a good story, authors have to either ignore this or invoke “warp drive” or some other magic.
I do have a couple clips that are about terminology, so not the best examples:
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Han Solo’s use of parsec as a unit of time in the original Star Wars
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In the 1957 movie “Kronos” the astronomer refers to calculating a UFO’s ecliptic. This is a nonsensical use of an astronomical term.
I recommend the book Bad Astronomy!
Thanks for the recommendation. I read Phil Plait’s book “Bad Astronomy” several weeks ago. Rumor has it that he used to post on the Straight Dope.
Trek has always bugged me because the starry backdrop always has looked so fake. Even with the remastered fx of the Original Series they are all clearly discs and not points of light. TNG was even worse, and some even insist those aren’t stars, but passing space dust, whee. You never get the sense that they are in a vast galaxy and universe, but that they’re in some studio somewhere (which was indeed the case natch). No Milky Way, no nebulas. TOS remastered shots at least had some red giants here and there. Plus if those are indeed stars they stream by during high warp speed far too fast.
I recently rewatched “From Venus with Love,” the first color episode of The Avengers - the Steed and Mrs. Peel Avengers.
Astronomers keep getting killed while looking through their telescopes at Venus. The planet is always a large featureless white disk nowhere near the sun, surrounded by a circlet of smaller white disks, presumably stars although they never twinkle, with absolutely nothing else in the image.
No science could ever be taken seriously in the show, of course, but not only was the astronomy ludicrous - they were all standing in well-lighted rooms - but the killer apparently found a way to make laser beams arc through the air to precisely enter a telescope’s tube.
He was Bad Astronomer.
Thanks. I’ll try to watch it.
Cool!
One of the most egregious examples must be Heroes, good show, but in season one a total solar eclipse is seen by people in Japan and the U.S. at the same time, I think in Europe too. And it’s implied that everybody in the world saw the eclipse at the same time.
That’s a good one. Do you know which episode it’s in?
It looks to be season 3, episodes 10 and 11, “The Eclipse” parts 1 and 2.
Years and years ago, when I listened to Star Talk on XM Radio, I remember Neil deGrasse Tyson saying that, in the movie Titanic, the stars in one of the shots were in the wrong place given the date and when the camera looked the other way, it was just a mirrored image of the first shot.
Not a TV show or movie, but there’s this from the video game Red Dead Redemption 2:
The moon is incorrectly placed - it’s on the northern skies, which would be correct if the game took place on the southern hemisphere. As the game takes place in North America, it should be on the southern skies. It also goes through phases much faster than the real thing.The constellations, while largely correct, are also incorrectly placed in relation to each other.
That reminds me of another thing I discovered, a picture of the ceiling in Grand Central Terminal in NYC. It shows a portion of the sky including the constellations of the zodiac, but it’s a mirror image.
Everyone puts in the wrong starfield. I’ve only ever seen two shows where a starfield in a night shot was correct: One episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender (the cartoon one), and one episode of Lucifer.
But with his help they fixed it for the home video releases.
Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto has the most opportune and shortest solar eclipse in all of history.