Space simulations. Common mistakes by artists

Factual Questions
1

In most news programmes when they announce some major interplanetary event or success of probe landings, the channels usually have artists impressions of the event. Some of these videos or drawings have, what i think to be basic errors.

For eg: the probe orbiting a distant planet like Jupiter will show a video of the clearly visible probe and the entire planet in the same frame. If seen from any perspective the 100 kg probe should be a mere speck when seen against the backdrop if giant like jupiter.

Why do they make such obvious misrepresentations.

Any more such obvious mistakes that can be listed.

2

They make them so that you can see both the probe and Jupiter. There’s no point in making a drawing in which the probe is so small tat it’s invisible, or in which Jupiter is so large it fills the entire background and isn’t identifiable.

It’s the same, really, as asking why the planet, the probe, and the stars are all equally visible in the image, when in order to see them all you’d have to have different exposures or apertures for each – people expect to see all three things in order to know where they are. If you don’t show planet, probe, and stars, some people will be lost and confused.
But it’s not just Artistic License. If you’re far enough away from Jupiter that you can see the entire planet in your “shot”, you can set your viewing point close enough so that your probe also fills a reasonable portion of your image.

3

These are done from the perspective of someone who’s very close to the probe, with the planet in the background. So the probe appears very large.

4

In a simple image what you describe can always be justified as being correct (at least in terms of relative apparent size) as viewed from some point in space. It is just a matter of perspective. The artist might be only a few tens of feet away from the spacecraft in order to create the picture.

You can then argue the question as to whether the perspective rendering of the spacecraft is actually consistent with the required distance (which you might well discover it isn’t.) Similarly the rendering of a planet at close quarters needs to be consistent with the apparent distance of the portrayal (being a sphere you can’t actually see an entire hemisphere and the disk you do see distorts the surface). However both of these effects would need you to sit down with a ruler and compass to determine.

In an animated depiction of say a flypast, you do get lots of liberties taken with perspective. The apparent speeds are always wildly out. The moment in time when the craft does fill the same view as the nearby planet is measured in microseconds, and as you say, will otherwise be an indiscernible speck, either behind or way in front of the notional artist.

5

They’re trying to convey information to the viewer, and the images they use achieve that. It’s not intended to be scientifically precise so it’s not a mistake.

6

Nothing wrong with that, if it’s from the perspective of an observer near the probe. Here’s an actual photo that makes the Apollo LEM a significant fraction of the size of the Moon, and larger than Earth.

The most common inaccuracy (artistic license) in space images is to show a star background behind brightly-lit planets and spacecraft, complete with a nebulous cloud which may be intended as the Milky Way but look more like a gas cloud (example). In reality the stars are so much fainter than the foreground, no camera or human eye could see both at the same time.

7

Miguelito’s thumb.

Miguelito: Amazing! My thumb is larger than the tower atop that house!

Mafalda: Do you know why you see it bigger?
Miguelito: Of course!

Miguelito: Because the thumb is MINE and I care about it a lot more than I care about the tower.
Maybe the OP has never played with perspective and a thumb? :slight_smile:

8

Perhaps no camera in existence could see both at the same time, but I don’t think that physics prohibits an arbitrarily large dynamic range. And there’s no reason that the response of a camera picture element must be linear. So if we can imagine a camera following some unlikely path to take a picture of a particular alignment of objects, we can also imagine a camera with the capabilities and response we prefer.

9

Here is a related video by some jerk.

10

Even if you had an infinite dynamic-range sensor, you’d also need a perfectly made, perfectly clean lens (zero scattering). And even then, diffraction may be enough to wash out the stars.

But I have more issue with how the background looks. This particular background looks nothing like an actual night sky.

11

The one that bothers me is when they show a video of an asteroid colliding with the earth, and it takes several seconds to go from the asteroid being several earth diameters away until it impacts. In real life, at a scale where you could see the whole earth, an asteroid would seem to be creeping along; you could barely see its movement.

12

Art Major Physics. Most of the time, I’m okay with it, as long as it’s fiction. A few bother me. The one that bothers me most is characters being really close to lava, almost touching, whew, they’re fine. Used in cartoons and low-budget action shows, usually. Other one that bugs me is the running-jump-off-the-tall-building in a harness. The show Leverage had a couple of those that drove me crazy - jumper should swing back and smack the windows.

13

And Star Wars prequels.

14

Anyone remember the scene in the first episode of Firefly, when they pass a Reaver ship going in the opposite direction? The crew watches with bated breath as the Reaver ship floats by very slowly in the opposite direction. Looks like each ship is doing about 10 mph.

15

If you have infinite dynamic range, you don’t need perfect focus to see the stars, since the slight defocusing will spread each out across several pixels, which will have no problems detecting them, what with the infinite dynamic range. :smiley:

Your point about how the sky looks to the human eye is a very good one. If artwork is trying to depict that, rather than be a pretty schematic of where things are, it should accurately represent what humans would actually see.

16

Don’t forget (as seen in numerous original Star Trek scenes, and any poorly thought out show since)… The stars visibly whip past the ship, giving a 3D effect. considering that typically stars are 4 or more light years apart minimum (in our neck of the spiral arm) that’s an absolutely impressive speed for any ship, covering 5 to 10 light years a second. Faster than physically possible and everything.

And yes - anything space view screws up the time scale. Planets visibly rotate below you - ummm, if they turned that fast things would be flying off and the planet would fly apart. Even something travelling at Earth escape velocity, which equals speed it would fall in from remote distances, 17,000 mph IIRC - that’s still 283 miles a minute, meaning about 30 seconds to get through that tiny layer of earth’s atmosphere, and - wait for it - 14 hours to reach earth from the distane of the moon. Oh, and scale - the current thought is that the dinosaur killer was about 5 to 10 miles in diameter - peanuts compared to the asteroids in most Sci-Fi movies, barely a blip compared to the earth - yet destructive enough to kill anything anywhere on earth that weighed more than a few pounds. Life is fragile.

Another issue with scale - I was so disappointed with the most recent Star Wars VII movie - we have something that seems can’t make up its mind if it’s a death star - tens of miles diameter - or a planet, where’s all that gravity coming from, it’s cracking up in real time with forces that depending on scale should be something between a 12 on the Richter scale to more than dino-killer disruption, yet all we see is huge cracks in the earth and the occasional pine tree falls over.

Plus, let’s not forget that spaceships and other equipment that has o get off the ground is typically not very solid; the Pentagon, for example suffered little damage from an airliner, it was mostly the fuel spraying into the windows that caused the damage. Airplanes, and presumably spaeceships, don’t bounce and skip and skid - they crumple like tissue paper and break into a thousand tiny shreds.

I’ve worked with furnaces that melt metals. Metal spilled on the floor in sufficient quantities will melt unshielded network cable insulation 12 feet up. A furnace hot enough to melt metal is actually painful -standing in front of an opening 3 feet by 1 foot glowing at 700 degrees, after 30 seconds my face was mildly sore for a day - a minor burn.

But then, Hollywood doesn’t know real cold, either - thinks that Superman - as in the original movie - can walk down the Alaska highway in the dead of winter wearing just a windbreaker having lost his superpowers, and only “look cold”. I knew of some guys who had to walk 10 miles in -40 and only one made it.

17

makes the point raised in the OP brilliantly.

18

I once lived up near Bozeman Pass, Montana.
One bad winter the temp outside was reported at better than 60 below.
I went outside, like a fool.

I literally thought i would die before i got the several feet back to the door, i was outside for only seconds, and i had a down parka arctic cat gauntlets and boots on.

1st think i remember noticing quickly is my lips feeling very painful like they were going to split open and explode, i took one small breath and that is when i realized i was in a lot of trouble.
I could feeling my sinus passages cracking, like they were instantly dessicated.
(Yes they did actually crack, they bled horribly later)
But the worst park was my chest, it was like something had just destroyed my lungs.
If you have ever touched dry ice with your skin, imagine your chest feeling like you just inhaled a dry ice fog, It was worse, it felt like i had just done something fatally irreversible. It hurt bad, bad enough i did not think i was going to make it the few feet back to the door.

All i did was breathe

Other things i was aware of, i could feel the heat being sucked out of my parka, i had to squint my eyes because it was so cold it was hurting them.

I have no doubt that if i was left out there for a few minutes i would have simply died.
I had been out in -40 before, and i knew it was no joke, but it was doable.
-20 more degrees was to me like different between the sun and a bic lighter.

Hollywood is make believe.
I have no idea how those guys climb everest and stuff in those kinds of temps and not die, maybe i’m a wimp.