So, what’s wrong with this picture?
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Answer: Aaaaiiiiieeeee!
OK, first, a little background.
The crescent Moon can be a stunning sight. It hangs near the Sun after sunset (or before sunrise), up in the west (or east) while people are still out and about. The shape itself is lovely, and it shines a pearly white in the deepening blue sky… and sometimes you can see the "dark" part of the Moon as well, softly glowing with reflected Earthlight.
Yet for all its beauty, and its position both in time and in the sky making it obvious and well-observed, people still seem to massively screw up their understanding of it.
I give you the program "Legend of the Seeker", the progenitor of that screen capture above, a fantasy series I had never even heard of until BABloggee Tom Elmer pointed it out to me. And why would he torture me so? So I can rail and froth about that picture depicted above, of course.
First, watch the scene yourself (note: that’s a link to Hulu, which I think is still only available inside the US; if that link takes you to the wrong episode it’s the 12th one of the first season). Don’t bother watching the whole thing (thank me later for that), but instead go to the 11 minute mark.
In this scene, Zedd, a wizard (you can tell from his hair) and the fair damsel Kahlan are schwitzing over an cursed boy. They have to break the spell, of course, but the sage says there is a deadline… they have to do it before the Moon covers three bright stars in the sky.
Of course! If I had a dollar for every time that’s happened to me, I could afford a stylish haircut like Zedd’s.
Anyway, take a look at the screen shot again. See the problem? Think on this: in the script, Zedd says, "Do you see how one star is beginning to disappear behind the Moon?" And you can clearly see that one of the three stars is very close to the edge of the lit crescent part of the Moon.
Got it now?
Here’s a basic astronomical fact: the Moon is a solid, opaque sphere. With me so far? Good. So when we see it as a crescent, it’s because we can only see a small part of the Moon that’s being lit by the Sun (we’re seeing that part from a shallow angle), and not because the Moon is physically like a slice of watermelon with a bite taken out of it.
So when the Moon is a crescent, the dark part is just unlit Moon, and not a scoop taken out of it. The only way to see stars superposed on the dark part of the Moon would be for the stars to be between the Moon and the Earth!
Now, the Sun — which is a star, you may recall — is 1.4 million kilometers across, and the Moon is only 400,000 km away, so you may see the problem here. Given that the Moon is the closest astronomical object in the sky, and the nearest star besides the Sun is 100 million times farther away, you might understand that any star we see would be behind the Moon, not in front of it.
So there’s no way to get stars between us and the Moon so that we see them against the dark part of the Moon. Of course, "Legend" is fantasy, so maybe in that universe stars are really really dinky. And close. And tied to mysterious curses.
But there’s a bigger mystery here: why does the fair damsel Kahlan look so much like Jessica Stover, who is also making a fantasy movie, and who also once asked me about phases of the Moon — which is in fact how we met?!
Hmmm.
March 8th, 2009 at 10:31 am
Those are “Fairy Stars” Dr. Plait.
Either that, or we finally found those “Phoenix Lights” that seemed to disapear in thin air (ignore the mountains you can’t see at night please).
March 8th, 2009 at 10:32 am
Unless the stars are IN FRONT of the moon, and you can’t see them once they line up with the bright part. Duh.
March 8th, 2009 at 10:36 am
Oh, I am so glad. I looked at the picture and knew right away what was wrong.
I am the hero!
Probably those three “stars” are instead three (very slow) metors or comets. Then this could happen
March 8th, 2009 at 10:39 am
Unless the “stars” are actually magic lights that are ON the moon!
March 8th, 2009 at 10:46 am
I have to point out that ‘Legend of the Seeker’ is a fantasy show not set on Earth or even in our own universe (seeing as magic works in the show’s reality). So, it’s not too far fetched to suppose that other violations of the laws of physics as we know them can take place.
March 8th, 2009 at 10:47 am
It helps to remember the immortal words of Lucy Lawless at times like this:
:Frink: “Yes, over here, [...] in Episode BF12, you were battling barbarians while riding a winged Appaloosa, yet in the very next scene, my dear, you’re clearly atop a winged Arabian! Please do explain it!”
Lucy Lawless: “Uh, yeah, well, whenever you notice something like that… a wizard did it.”
Frink: “Yes, alright, yes, in episode AG04-”
Lucy Lawless: “Wizard!”
- The Simpsons, “Treehouse of Horror X”
March 8th, 2009 at 10:48 am
Haha! This is another one of those cases where what was wrong with the picture was so obviously wrong that I thought “Well that’s too obvious! There must be something else wrong that Phil’s talking about.” Sometimes things are just as stupid as they appear.
March 8th, 2009 at 11:02 am
The first time I saw something like this was an old Simpson’s episode. Real “what the ….” moment. Thankfully it wasn’t Futurama, though — that would have made me weep for days
.
March 8th, 2009 at 11:02 am
LoL, I didn’t see anything wrong… There’s a moon, with three moonbases on it that are visible from earth, cool!
Oh, these are stars that are supposed to be behind the moon… -.-
March 8th, 2009 at 11:10 am
Yeah, I spotted the Fail as soon as I saw the pic.
Unless, of course, those are Apollo landing sites where laser reflectometers were installed, and someone is shining three really, really amazingly powerful lasers (one each red, blue and green, which is why they look white) at them (switching between the three reflectors several times a second, of course, so it looks continuous to an observer on the Earth).
On reflection, though (see, Phil, you’re not the only one who can make awful puns), aren’t Kedd and Kahlan amazingly lucky that the three relevant stars are all naked-eye objects? I mean, what are the chances of that?
BTW, Phil, are you sure about that character’s name – Kedd? I’ve not seen the TV adaptation, but in the book, Wizard’s First Rule, there’s this character called Zed. I don’t recall a “Ked” (are you sure you’re not getting confused with Ursula LeGuin’s character Ged?).
March 8th, 2009 at 11:20 am
Wow, that was painful. Thanks for ruining my Sunday.
March 8th, 2009 at 11:23 am
You people just don’t get it. Those lights are ON the moon. Der. They’re proof of the moon hoax because if we’d been there we would have seen them. Unless NASA’s covering that up, too. What do you have to say about that, Mr. NASA-Paycheck-Receiver-Plait??
(btw: soooo j/k)
March 8th, 2009 at 11:25 am
Okay, I just showed my 7-year old this picture. Not only did he spot the “mistake” right away and without prompting, he explained the phases of the Moon to me and that stars are really much farther away than the Moon so they couldn’t be between the Earth and the Moon.
March 8th, 2009 at 11:29 am
Wow, even worse that my traumatic encounter with bad lunar science last week when I was trying to come up with some sci-fi for the ten year old and encountered “Life as we Knew It” — in the first pages, the moon is knocked out of its orbit when hit by an asteroid, causing tidal waves and general chaos. The author describes how, in the space of minutes, the moon (a) looks larger and (b) becomes a crescent rather than half moon (or vice versa — my brain fried trying to cope with all the ways the whole scene made no sense).
Does anyone have a link to a list of good juvenile hard sci-fi — something as fun and hard science based as the best of the classics, but more up to date? Boy helps dad explore the oceans of Europa, fighting space pirates on the methane lakes of Titan, something other than the wall of fantasy dreck that has taken over the sci-fi shelves since I was a kid? Or do I just wait until the kid is old enough to handle Alistair Reynolds?
March 8th, 2009 at 11:29 am
I didn’t even recognize those dots as stars. I thought something was impacting the moon, like a barrage of asteroids.
March 8th, 2009 at 11:30 am
The picture is awful, yes. I would blame the effects people, as I’m sure the actors just see a green screen there – except that Zedd (not Kedd) says the star is beginning to disappear behind the moon. I’ve seen a star go behind the moon through a telescope. It doesn’t gradually disappear; it’s just there one instant and gone the next.
So now I have to blame the effects people and the scriptwriters.
March 8th, 2009 at 11:38 am
Yes, the wizard’s name is actually Zedd, even in the horrible TV series adaptation. The books are good, though!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeddicus_Zu%27l_Zorander
March 8th, 2009 at 11:53 am
Another theory:
It’s the lunar base “Alpha Beta” with the Mayflower-1 approaching with zero-point-five-warp!
March 8th, 2009 at 11:54 am
Just as a thought, could it possibly be that the moon of this fictional planet exists only as a crescent. Some traumatic astronomical catastrophe destroyed a large portion of the moon, and only a crescent remains. That would justify the stars appearing to disappear behind the crescent moon.
I know this is a huge stretch, and just an attempt to provide an explanation for a big mistake.
Oh, and I’ve never seen the show and don’t plan on it, so I’m not just some apologetic fan.
March 8th, 2009 at 11:55 am
This reminds me of a recent car commercial where a solar eclipse is depicted as a dark **crescent** on the circle of the sun.
March 8th, 2009 at 11:57 am
I always give these sorts of errors far too much creative leeway.
For example, I tell myself that a) the characters are stupid and don’t know what they’re talking about, and b) what they’re looking at are magic fairies, moon pixies or whatever else could plausibly be said to exist in this fantasy environment.
It’s like when a character on a TV show, movie or book states something that’s factually incorrect (”World War Two started in 1933!”), our gut reaction is to think, “Okay, the writer’s really stupid!” rather than, “Okay, that character’s really stupid!” Of course, it’s usually the former, but my suspension of disbelief likes to believe it’s the latter.
March 8th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Dude.
You’re complaining about this point in a series that has wizards, magical powers, elixirs that give magical powers, evil witch women, prophecies, resurrections, and Satan under another name.
And *this* you find a little hard to believe?
March 8th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
I am tangentially connected to the show and I will tell you that the folks who make the thing are not entirely ignorant of the true nature of the heavenly bodies and how they move about one another. A discussion was had, at great length, as to whether to go reality with this or to go with the reality of the crescent moon as it was perceived by, say, your average pre-Kepler farm dweller. The decision was made to go with the latter, which we are now seeing was an error, because the distortion took many viewers — even fans of the show, of which there are many more than you would imagine — out of the story. I would also say that the special effects wizards made the error of having it both ways — shading in the “missing” area of the moon.
One lives, and one learns.
March 8th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
Simple they are UFOs flying in formation between the earth and the moon.
They just think they are stars. What do they know.
March 8th, 2009 at 12:13 pm
I had similar thoughts as Temper, “Please let those be moon bases, please let moon bases…”.
March 8th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Okay.. no one used this yet
That’s not a moon.
J/P=?
yer welcome
March 8th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
or maybe they’re trying to imitate profundity and pretend literary erudition by echoing the “star within the horned moon” passage in Coleridge inappropriately. ROFL
March 8th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
They’re UFOs, duh.
March 8th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Come on Phil, you’re really low on material today if you have to rant so long about some thing like this bugging you.
The article became pointless to read the moment these words appeared:
Kedd, a wizard …
Now, if this had been the very common case of a real photographer selling photographic art, where he’s trying to get away with claiming it’s one single photo when it’s really a mosaic, where the moon has been obviously thrown into the mosaic with no regard for accuracy … THEN you’d have something to rant about.
I hate that.
March 8th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
Okay, until I watched the clip, I figured those lights were supposed to be in front of the moon, and I thought the problem was just that there’d be no way the moon would be such a thin crescent with the sky so dark.
I THOUGHT WRONG.
March 8th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Like the man said, it’s fantasy, a couple of steps more advanced in realism than the 1938 Disney short, “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod”. The moon is a real crescent in both, not to be believed, but to be beautiful. (In “Haredevil Hare”, with Bugs Bunny and Marvin the Martian and his dog, on the other hand, it’s for laughs.)
In “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader”, it is firmly established that the world of Narnia is flat, and a Narnian is astounded to learn that the English children are from one of the round worlds of myth. The world of Middle-Earth was originally flat, too, until several thousand years before the events of “The Lord of the Rings”, when God bent the world in order to put the Blessed Lands forever out of Men’s reach. (To get there now, you have to sail where the flat sea /used/ to be, which only the Elves can do.) This is what fantasy is for.
For the rest, I much prefer the unpretentiously amusing “Legend of the Seeker” TV series to the books, larded as they are with the nauseating “philosophy” of Ayn Rand.
March 8th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
These are Armstrong (founded 2021 by NASA), Tchiolkovsky (2024 by RKA) and Copernicus (2034 by ESA).
March 8th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
I thought the moon was made of cheese.
March 8th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
Mchl is overoptimistic with this dates. There are only 12 years ahead before reaching 2021 (and reaching 45, horreur!!!). Moreover, we do not need Moon bases adding to light-pollution.
March 8th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
The fact that this is a fantasy show doesn’t really matter, because this is a dumb mistake not some kind of magic that makes sense within the context of the show.
March 8th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
I don’t know enough about this series…
But in general I think it is perfectly ok to have flat earth, spells, gods and other magic like shape-shifting moon in a fantasy setting… If it is self-consistent.
You know… In a classic fantasy stars are not suns, people climb to the moon, etc…
March 8th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
More likely is that the moon is transparent, but it’s surface behaves like a two-way mirror. The dim starlight from behind gets through, but the bright light from the sun is reflected, revealing surface features while hiding information from behind. That’s still a huge stretch, but I think it has an air (as in the moon’s atmosphere) of plausability.
March 8th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
@ Rick T:
I dunno, I still think Heinlein’s “The Star Beast” is one of the best joovies ever written, and still very appealing to kids, I would think. And I would think Clarke’s short stories still hold up pretty well, although the science is a little dated.
March 8th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
Well, there’s the trouble, right there! The average pre-Kepler farm dweller would have known quite well that stars do not ever, never, ever appear within the horns of the moon. This knowledge would have come from simple observation of the night sky, something pre-Keplerian farmers were quite good at.
More likely, this is an art director’s really bad call.
March 8th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
Hmm, was this worth such a long post?
March 8th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
That’s no moon. It’s a space station.
March 8th, 2009 at 1:05 pm
Kind of reminds me of an issue I always had with Stephen King’s “Dark Tower” series. In Roland’s world there’s not only a north star but a southern star as well. And they can both be seen at the same time in the same location every night. This led me to two conclusions, first it’s possible that one of them is a pole star like Polaris. But if Roland’s world is a sphere the other cannot be a polestar because the planet would be in the way. So either Roland lives on a flat disc like Terry Pratchett’s Disc world, or the second star is not a star at all.
Consider this scenario:
One of the stars is a pole star, call it a north star to keep things simple. Then the south star could be a very large satellite in geosynchronous orbit. Provided Roland never travels further than the continent he was born on then the south star will for the most part appear to be in the same place every night.
While I was reading the series I thought it would be interesting if at some point the protagonists found themselves on a space station masquerading as the southern star, but maybe that’s just because I’m really a sci-fi geek at heart.
So in the case here what if the three “stars” represent large structures at the L1 point of the earth moon system? They would have to be very large to be visible in that location and probably spread out to the point that they would no longer be within stable orbit as I don’t think the L1 point is big enough.
But… Isn’t science fun?
March 8th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
Utakata Says: I thought the moon was made of cheese.
It is, everybody else are just being stubbornly silly about this fact.
March 8th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
I like Seeker.
It’s all about growth of the hero and his friends,,,
Gary 7
March 8th, 2009 at 1:13 pm
Well, at least they seem to understand that the moon moves relative to the stars. Lots of folks wouldn’t have thought of using that.
My question is WHY the stars have any impact on whatever it was. (I watched it with the sound off, and jumped to 11:00.) Are the stars wired to the guys qi or something? Three *bright* stars that close together does seem suspicious, whatever solar system one is in.
Maybe the “stars” are happy life-giving fairies, shining their power down onto what’s-his-name. When they reach the lighted portion of the moon, they rest or nest or something, and the kid dies if he isn’t at his best. The creepy wizard fellow may not have wanted to explain all that to the bint, for some reason, and paraphrased a little too much.
I thought maybe the stars were just an indicator of time, but the scary guy spent time looking at them, not giving the boy first aid. That guy does creep me out.
The “moon” may have just been a crescent body made of cheese or whatever. I’m seeing enough light in the mists around the crescent, to not think that there is a partially-lit rest of a sphere. It’s just glare in general.
March 8th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
Okay, I take that back. I copied the image into Paint, zoomed in, and now say that the moon shows a textured sphere.
I also cut out the triangle of stars and dragged it around over the crescent. There’s only one way to get all three stars behind the crescent all at once. Otherwise, at least one is showing at all times.
March 8th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
There’s also some pretty bad astronomy (well, not as bad as this) in the Watchmen movie, which I saw last night (have to say: “meh.”).
Anyway, there’s a scene on Mars where there are two fattish crescent moons near the horizon. I don’t actually remember if the lit portions were pointing the right way or not, so I’ll presume that they were might have been since I didn’t notice, but the moons were far too large to be Phobos and Deimos.
March 8th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
Maybe Zedd, not Kedd…
And there’s no scene like that from the books, that I remember…. but this being a fantasy, I would go with the reason of “they’re magic.”
March 8th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
Ha ha!
I’d wondered if that e-mail got through
-Tometheus (a.k.a. Tom Elmer)
March 8th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
@Didac: That’s the kind of light pollution I wouldn’t mind at all!
Oh… and I forgot to mention Chinese ‘Peaceful Harbour’ founded 2029 on the dark[1] side of the moon.
[1] Hey! It’s Bad Astronomy site, isn’t it?
March 8th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
It never occurred to me that the lights on the moon surface were supposed to be stars behind it. I think your brain must fill in information based on knowledge aquired already. You know the moon is solid so the lights can’t be in the distance so cannot be stars. I presumed they were explosions, a co-ordinated terrorist attack on moonbases perhaps? Just seeing the picture without any context can also aid the filling in of gaps in information as it relies on your knowlegde rather than anything else.
I was more amazed at getting the background stars, crescent moon and foreground objects all correctly exposed for the photograph.
March 8th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
Ha! Yes that is very odd. A very JSto-ish shot in terms of content. I watched 2 minutes of that show a while back and it was terrible. Although, M.Sto seemed to like the books just fine.
In filmmaking I aim to ground fantasy/sci-fi in science more so than… pretty much everyone. But this isn’t a slight snafu it’s a rather large MOON FAIL.
I will alert the Wingmen. This is the sort of thing we care about.
March 8th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
I saw something similar – in the movie “Hoodwinked”, there was a whole scene near the end of the movie where they showed the moon, and it was all wrong! Instead of a regular crescent moon, they used a white circle, with a black smaller radius circle superimposed on it… Which is of course all wrong. It really made me wince.
March 8th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
Forget fantasy fiction – science ignorance is all around us. Just in the past couple of days my wife came home from a cooking class where the instructor said that to measure oven temps accurately, place a pan of water in the oven, let it heat up and measure the water temp! Fine; at our altitude (6,000′) you could check the temperature all the way up to 201 degrees F! Then at a health fair waiting for a glaucoma check, the doctor cautioned the patient before me that we really need eye protection at our altitude “because we are a lot closer to the sun.” Like one part in 93,000,000. Sigh…
March 8th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
Yikes – when I saw that picture, before reading the post and without any knowledge of the show, I thought maybe someone was claiming to have captured an image of the Noss Triads orbiting in front of the moon – or – it was from some SciFi show where aliens had built three baseball stadiums for night games on the moon.
March 8th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
This post reminds me of the one a year (or two) ago about the Dreamworks logo. Everytime I see a Dreamworks movie I now chuckle at the obvious reflection mistake.
March 8th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Come on, Phil. It’s a show about _wizards_. For all you know, a big invisible snake can be eating the moon in their world so you actually can see thru the crescent. Do not apply rules of our world to fantasy, magic-filled fictional universe.
March 8th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Perhaps in their world, most of the moon is blown away somehow and it left that a physical crescent because physics work completely differently there and…
Forget it.
Seriously though when i saw the picture before reading your article I thought that someone was shining three really bright lights on the moon, or they were alien spaceships, in either case I though it was a Science Fiction show. Shows what I watch to much of.
March 8th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
I saw that episode and remember that scene. As others have mentioned, it’s a fantasy. In a show filled with magic, wizards, witches, prophecies, the odd strange creature, and, presumably, a dragon or two, why fixate on this?
March 8th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
I can’t view the clip, but from the still image would I be correct in assuming that the moon is portrayed as moving from right to left wrt the stars?
March 8th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
Duh… it’s one of those infamous triangle UFOs. Like how Art Bell describes.
March 8th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
Edward Said:
“A discussion was had, at great length, as to whether to go reality with this or to go with the reality of the crescent moon as it was perceived by, say, your average pre-Kepler farm dweller. The decision was made to go with the latter,…”
The problem with this approach is that, even if primitives may have understood the Moon to be a crescent instead of a half-lit sphere, in hindsight we know that they would never have actually witnessed distant stars through the Moon’s dark half. The irony in this case is that it was all unnecessary: the three distant stars could as easily be occulted by a spherical Moon. So why go to all the trouble of doing it this way?
And besides that, the Moon’s orbit carries it eastward, and assuming that this fantasy world is essentially in the Northern hemisphere (it looks like northern-style mythology), it means that the three stars should’ve been off to the left side of the Moon in order to be snuffed out one-by-one later on. It’s dumb.
March 8th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
Yikes. Clearly those would be the headlights of a train (the one from Murder on the Orient Express) that had gone sub-orbital and was about to land on the unsuspecting fellow in the foreground.
(Even my six year old spotted the problem right off).
March 8th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
I love the full moon in the Tonight Show backdrop. Nicely hanging over the pretty sunset (sunrise?) behind the city skyline. Always cracks me up.
March 8th, 2009 at 4:13 pm
The reason that Phil is fixating on this is because his website is called Bad Astronomy. If it was called Bad Wizardry then he would be complaining about the inconsistency of a teen being a wizard when we all know that it takes years of school to be a wizard.
March 8th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
I often wonder why, with all of us out here blogging about science and available to answer questions, why ADs don’t call for a little science backup before they make these decisions? I imagine that at least one reason would be that an expert would tell you what’s really going on and that would mess with the story line and we can’t have that, can we? Of course, that would happen, but you know what — sometimes us experts can help moviemaker folks find another, just as cool way to show something that wouldn’t violate the willing suspension of disbelief that they rely on to tell tales…
March 8th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
I’m a late arrival to this party, but I’ll add my two pennies’ worth…
Anyone here remember the Procter & Gamble controversy when, as a result of an urban legend, the company received unwanted media publicity in the early 1980s that their previous corporate logo was a Satanic symbol? The accusation was based on a particular passage in the Bible, specifically Revelation 12:1, which states: “And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the Sun, and the Moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.”
Original Procter & Gamble Logo.
(Click on image for the link to read article.)
Since P&G’s original logo consists of a man’s face on a moon surrounded by thirteen stars, some had claimed that the logo is a mockery of the heavenly symbol alluded to in the aforementioned verse, and hence the logo is Satanic. Where the beard meets the surrounding circle, a mirror image of the number 666 can be seen when viewed from inside the logo, and this had been interpreted as the reflected number of the beast, again linked to Satanism.
Go figure!
March 8th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
I would also point out that even a fictional fantasy world needs to be internally consistent, and without reliable cause/effect relationships there can be no narrative.
Gravity and light would have to work in a fairly similar fashion in that universe as it does in ours, or else there would be no planets with humanoid wizards on them to tell stories about, so the astronomical criticism is perfectly valid.
But perhaps the moon in question is something like Saturn’s moon Janus, with two halves made of substantially different components. One part is opaque while the other is transparent, or is composed of a metamaterial that refracts visible light around it.
The three stars in questions are perhaps not actual stars, but quasars, emitting gamma rays, and the humanoid wizards possess a physiology analogous to photosynthesis, wherein they absorb gamma radiation in order to power their “magic”.
March 8th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
A question for all the ST:TNG fans reading this –
How many lights do you see?
March 8th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
I see 4 lights!!
March 8th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
Duh! Those are colonies on the Moon.
March 8th, 2009 at 6:26 pm
I think you forgot “the stupid, it burns!” poster. Anyways, I thought the error was extremely funny. They should do it again!
March 8th, 2009 at 6:30 pm
I know that the moon is too close to be a gravitational lens. But would you mind explaining that for us anyway?
March 8th, 2009 at 6:45 pm
Great books, horrible television adaptation. Like the hair, though…
(Zedd, not Kedd!) It’s a fantasy show, forgivable, but still amusing. The stars are magical guys, it needs no further explanation!!!
March 8th, 2009 at 7:03 pm
I immediately figured that this was some kind of alien spacecraft, which Legend of the Seeker is trying to cover up to maintain the evil Pluto-hating conspiracy!
March 8th, 2009 at 7:04 pm
JB, I saw five lights, but my eyes are a little crossed after hangin’ around for so long.
It’s odd that the Map To Earth from saeson 2 of BSG never showed up on this blog, with all 12 ecliptic constellations in the sky at one time, and showing M8 in Scorpius where about where M4 should be. As far as we know, even at this point in the series, that actually was supposed to be a real, useful map to Earth, as in the real one currently under our butts. Kind of a bummer for a sci-fi show that attempts to be as realistic as possible with the science. I’m still hoping that map will turn out to be wrong within the context of the series, somehow altered by someone or just a decoy to steer any Earth-seekers off course.
March 8th, 2009 at 7:06 pm
Maybe those 3 stars are not really stars but huge satellites (natural? artificial?) orbiting the planet…
March 8th, 2009 at 7:44 pm
I watched the pilot to this series and got to play the fun game of “Spot the Archetype” where map the characters and situations from the series onto those from Star Wars (for example) that are based on the exact same archetypes. This was a particularly good match. Also, since it’s filmed in the same place, you can also have a game of “Spot the Location” and match the filming locations to similar scenes in Hercules and Xena.
No point in watching it as a show, though, since it’s crap.
March 8th, 2009 at 7:48 pm
When I saw that picture I thought the 3 lights were UFOs invading the earth – they couldn’t possibly be stars.
These are the sorts of shows I can’t help giving a running commentary on – and that in turn usually leads to me being banned from watching them.
March 8th, 2009 at 7:59 pm
Man, I hate it when I make a dumb mistake like getting a name wrong. And I went to the “Legend” website to check it! That’s a weird brain thing. Teach me to write before my coffee.
March 8th, 2009 at 8:00 pm
Maybe its not stars, but something else that looks like stars to the people there.
March 8th, 2009 at 8:15 pm
I find it odd that anyone is complaining about this post. This is a common mistake in popular media, and it makes no sense, regardless of setting, time period, or whether the damn thing was meant to be a crescent or not (which the shading indicates it wasn’t).
Bad astronomy all the way!
March 8th, 2009 at 9:40 pm
@RickT
When I was a tween & young teen (11-14 years old, or there abouts), I remember reading some of Lester Del Rey’s novels & short stories. They were more adventure than hard science, but at least tended (if I recall correctly) to be somewhat consistent with real-world science, and internally consistent. Some of his short stories I read also had interesting philosophical ponderings in them, including an interesting tale of an alien invasion of Earth, where humanity had fallen out of favor with the ‘Creator,’ who instead was on the side of the aliens.
As for this moon pic, my first thought was that there were three lights between the moon and the observer. I STILL see it that way, in spite of knowing the dialogue from the script. Maybe, years from now when this is a hugely popular series, they’ll release a Special Remastered Edition Mega-Boxed Set DVD that corrects the moon and other sfx gaffs. (Just kidding.)
March 8th, 2009 at 9:50 pm
Those lights are explosions from the warring tribes after the Prefect’s murder.
Farscape anyone???
Took me a while to place him since it wasn’t on the fimography that I looked at.
“But I don’t want toooo captain!”
March 8th, 2009 at 9:53 pm
This show looks worse than scifi channels adaptation of ‘a wizard of earthsea’
March 8th, 2009 at 11:22 pm
When I first saw the picture I thought the problem was that three craters were shining. That would have been a little less ignorant than the Moon being partially transparent or having teeny tiny stars between the Earth and the Moon.
March 9th, 2009 at 12:33 am
rayceeya, Re: Dark Tower series. One of the characters (Susanna, I think) noticed that at least one of the stars shone with a steady light which let her know that it wasn’t a star but a planet. Perhaps it was actually a very large geostationary satellite.
March 9th, 2009 at 3:21 am
Well, bad astronomy perhaps but in a fantasy setting, this naive depiction of the crescent moon occluding stars makes perfect sense. Actually, if they decided, in a fantasy story, to make this in a scientifically correct way, the fantasy “sense of wonder” of the story would suffer slightly, IMHO.
Then of course, whether or not this particular show is a good fantasy show at all is a completely different matter.
This kind of mistake in a hard sci-fi setting would be a no-no of course. THAT would be a valid reason for complaint
.
PS. Regarding comment above regarding a southern star and a northern star which both are visible at the same time… well, another fun ‘unrealistic’ thing you can add a few of to a fantasy story. Heck, that’s part of the fun with fantasy, after all, those things that partially defies logic and science.
March 9th, 2009 at 3:33 am
The Ill-Temepered Klavier said:
I take it you refer to the lines:
The stars were dim and thick the night / The steersman’s face by his lamp gleamed white / From the sails the dew did drip / ‘Til clomb above the eastern bar / the horned moon with one bright star / within the nether tip / One after one, by the star-dogged moon / Too quick for groan or sigh / Each turned his face with ghastly pang / And cursed me with his eye / Four times fifty living men, and I heard nor sigh nor groan / With heavy thump, a lifeless lump / They drop’t down, one by one.
Is it?
March 9th, 2009 at 3:47 am
@kuhnigget: Thanks, you just saved my keyboard from some extra wear. @justcorbly: Even a dragon is explainable. This, on the other hand, is just like giving up on gravity. A show with wizards (and everything else) floating freely around, now that would be awesome! Let’s drop the photons too, so we don’t have to hire in expensive CGI folks. And if we suppose sound works like under water, we can just play some recordings of whales, then we won’t even need a script at all.
March 9th, 2009 at 4:19 am
Shows how literal minded I am. When I first saw the picture before reading the post, I figured it was a show about UFOs coming in that happened to be passing in front of the moon. I never even considered that Hollywood would be so inept to consider those stars. LOL
March 9th, 2009 at 4:20 am
That reminds me of the worst case of Bad Astronomy I spotted on TV a couple of weeks ago. An episode of Heroes had a total solar eclipse that went on for hours(!), and in addition to that, it was visible all over the world. That really beats the star-transparent moon, and I stopped watching Heroes after that. Which, actually, I should have done long before that…
March 9th, 2009 at 4:32 am
Well, this could potentially be explained by those objects actually being small moons of Earth closer in. But it wouldn’t really make sense that they would disappear in that case.
March 9th, 2009 at 4:45 am
I would like to reiterated the most ridiculous part of this error, which has been mentioned by several previous commenters: the moon is presented as a solid object with earthshine gently illuminating the dark side, and then the stars are superimposed on top of it!
March 9th, 2009 at 4:59 am
Honestly, doesn’t bug me, mistake or otherwise. Plenty of perfectly reasonable fantasy worlds (not sci-fi worlds) have star and moons together in a firmament, whereas others may have stars in front of other objects like the sun(s) and moon(s), or suns orbiting planets. It all depends on which mythos you want to play around in. I don’t recall what Goodkind’s intentions were (read ‘em a long time ago), but in fantasy fic, I don’t demand real science or even real world. Sci-fi is another story, of course.
March 9th, 2009 at 5:11 am
Ken said:
What, you mean we shouldn’t expect invented universes to be logically consistent????
March 9th, 2009 at 5:19 am
Bob said:
What, you mean we shouldn’t expect invented universes to be logically consistent????
March 9th, 2009 at 5:20 am
Justcorbly said:
What, you mean we shouldn’t expect invented universes to be logically consistent????
March 9th, 2009 at 6:18 am
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cgJgnG9YzY
Susie Smartypants explains evolution
March 9th, 2009 at 6:37 am
I think it’s all more the case of someone at the CGI company not stopping to think about what they are doing. On most TV schedules, this crap is cranked out at a lightining pace. So, dumb stuff creeps in.
That’s no moon… it’s a space station!
March 9th, 2009 at 6:44 am
Uh, yeah. Why does a fantasy world have to follow real science at all? It’s not science fiction.
The above Nigel Depledge seems to not realize that fantasy CAN be internally, logically consistent with itself (which it what matters in fantasy) and be set in a world where this is possible. It’s not SET in the real world and invented worlds can have NOTHING to do with the real world if the author wants them too. Nigel, can you read? Do you know what “fantasy” means? ’cause you should crack open Wikipedia and LOOK. IT. UP. Before complaining your ass off in a way that makes you come across as the moron you are.
March 9th, 2009 at 6:46 am
“Here’s a basic astronomical fact: the Moon is a solid, opaque sphere.” In a fantasy work, the moon could be a transparent, flat sphere. Why the HELL does it have to follow actual astronomy? Note that it is a crappy show.
March 9th, 2009 at 7:06 am
While I don’t disagree with the artistic use of the stars over the dark side of the moon (its a fantasy world, the only thing it has to be is INTERNALLY – not logically – consistent), its badly done as the glow can be seen radiating off the dark side as well. It looks like a bad photoshop job.
March 9th, 2009 at 7:18 am
Just another note. I’m not familiar with the show, but if the sun and moon have the same apparent motion in the sky, and they are in the northern hemisphere (which I’d assume, because it would be familiar to the show’s writers), then the phase of the moon is also wrong. The crescent would be getting smaller, rather than bigger and “covering” the stars.
March 9th, 2009 at 7:29 am
The thing that bothers me most about this is not whether it is consistent with our current or historical scientific understanding. Rather, anyone who spends any time at all looking at the night sky will never have seen stars “inside” the Moon. Ever. It does not matter whether the Earth goes around the Sun or the other way around, or even whether the Earth is round or flat or burrito-shaped. The theory behind it is irrelevant: nobody has ever looked up at a night sky and seen something like the picture in this post. Theories are made to fit data, and it is the data that is wrong here.
I am left with the choice of feeling really sad that either the people who produced the show (or at least the scene) have not spent enough nights stargazing to feel this to be intuitively wrong, or to feel insulted that they expect their viewers not to have done so.
March 9th, 2009 at 7:40 am
Opisthokont,
Ah, but you’re implying that in this particular fantasy universe, stars are farther away than the Moon. That isn’t necessarily true.
Similarly, the Moon my glow based on fluid inside it sloshing around, rather than reflecting sunlight (so that it could be crescent at any time, not just near dawn/dusk), or the Moon could have a dark aura around it (such that stars fade away as they approach it, rather than staying clear). My point is you shouldn’t feel the need to make comparisons between our world and any fantasy world – it’s like comparing apples to Priuses. Sci-fi, of course, is another story.
That said, Edward’s post fairly early on suggests that indeed it was a mix-up between writing and SFX, rather than some specific character of the universe in question. But that’s a separate issue from arguing over whether it’s “realistic.”
March 9th, 2009 at 8:11 am
The Jimmy Dean breakfast sandwich commercial features a similar crescent (croissant?) Moon becoming “full”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHjWO6CTn0Y
March 9th, 2009 at 8:28 am
Just because it’s a fantasy TV show, does not mean that Phil’s criticism is invalid. As was pointed out, being a fantasy story does not mean you have to be inconsistent. There is nothing in the Yeard’s stories that indicates the stars and planets and other astronomical entities behave in completely alien and inconsistent ways (unlike, say, Pratchett’s giant tortoise planet which is explicitly described and internally consistent). I’m tired of hearing excuses such as “it’s fantasy” to wave away that sort of stupidity. We all know that lightsabers are impossible, and that orcs and elves don’t exist in real life, but they make sense in the context of their respective works and nobody will ever complain about that — with good reason. The stars-in-the-moon-crescent thing, on the other hand, makes no sense in any kind of context except possibly a comedic cartoon like Ren & Skimpy!
That said, Phil, don’t listen to the folks who told you that the books were good even if the TV adaptation isn’t. Somehow, they managed to make the TV show even worse than the books, which is no small feat, but the books are some of the worst things ever written. Trust me.
March 9th, 2009 at 8:34 am
Ozymandias said:
Whoo, looks like someone’s suffered a fatal sense-of-humour failure.
BTW, Ozymandias, this “moron” happens to have a PhD, so don’t go slagging off people you don’t know, for no good reason.
The moon in the picture is quite clearly depicted as a solid spheroid. The “stars” in the pic are quite clearly in front of the unlit portion. Now, since gravity and light work in this fantasy world in exactly the same way as they do in ours, we can deduce that stars are, perforce, bigger than moons. Therefore, they just got it wrong. Hey, they’re human, it happens. Stop trying to make excuses for it.
BTW, all of the “oh, but it’s a fantasy world and we can’t expect the same rules of physics” apologetics are all rather insubstantial retcons. The laws of physics and biology (and, therefore, chemistry) all work exactly as we expect. Light travels in straight lines. Night follows day. Sound travels through the air. Bows and arrows work. Swords work. People breathe, eat, sleep, defaecate and reproduce. Unlike some hardcore sci-fi, it’s our world + a bit of magic here and there.
In fact, at the beginning of the book, the story begins in a world free of magic that seems remarkably similar to certain idealised bits of mediaevel Europe. So, it is perfectly reasonable to expect some logical consistency.
March 9th, 2009 at 8:38 am
Ozymandias said:
Because they call it “the Moon”? Because it is depicted in the image as an opaque spheroid?
BTW, if it were flat, it could not be a sphere, so your “transparent, flat sphere” is impossible. Do you know any geometry? Perhaps you should go to Wikipedia and “LOOK.IT.UP.”.
Or, you could just recognise the fact that, whether it matters or not, the programme makers simply got it wrong.
March 9th, 2009 at 8:41 am
Inajira said:
Yeah, well the books are internally consistent – they are consistent with the internal logic of a world that is, basically, a loose approximation of mediaevel Earth + magic.
Pray tell, if you please, how we would judge an illogical form of consistency?
March 9th, 2009 at 8:47 am
Geomancer said:
Yes, it is.
Every indication is that, in Goodkind’s world, gravity and light behave exactly as they do in ours, with the only exceptions being those brought about by the working of magic.
Therefore, for stars to shine, they must be very massive things. The moon does not shine, therefore it cannot be possessed of a stellar mass. Therefore, the stars, in order to seem smaller, must be farther from the observer than the moon.
Now, you can apply retcons and claim that there is some kind of invisible sky fairy that is working magic to make the massive stars so very very tiny that they can be closer than the moon and still appear to be smaller, but there is no indication, in either the books or the snippet the BA has linked to, that such a thing occurs. Meanwhile, we know humans to be fallible. We know, in particular, that TV and movie studios’ depiction of science is especially prone to failure. Therefore, the only parsimonious explanation is that they simply got it wrong.
Why is that so hard to deal with?
March 9th, 2009 at 9:01 am
So this is all about some dorky sci-fi show that is about wizards right? Wizards that can manipulate reality with some hocus pocus voodoo? So why would the moon/star thing be an issue worth talking about at all? If you are going to suspend any notion of reality by watching a show about frakkin wizards why wouldn’t people think they could also manipulate moons and stars as well?
March 9th, 2009 at 9:14 am
@Cheyenne (and some others)
Well, if we resort to the “wizards did it” apologetic, then there are some other questions that arise.
1) To what end did they do this? Simply to act as a clock for some curse?
2) Did they actually manipulate the physical characteristics of the moon to make it transparent? Or to physically interpose the stars between the moon and planet, while also making them smaller? If either of those, that would take a great deal of magic, and again, we need to answer #1. Why not use that kind of power to some more productive end (for either good or bad)?
3) Did they just create some bright lights in the sky? If so, then why call them stars? And if they are in front of the moon, then they wouldn’t be “covered” by it. Granted, the argument could be made that they look like stars so we call them stars, and they appear to vanish behind the moon as the bright part increases and drowns out their light, so we say the moon covers them – it’s easier to understand that way. That almost sounds more contrived than that the wizards magicked the physical characteristics of the moon and stars, though.
So, there are still some logical inconsistencies involved with the “wizardsdidit” argument.
March 9th, 2009 at 9:17 am
Well, we know that they got it wrong (see Edward’s post).
The argument about right/wrong was never the point of my posts. My beef is that you (and others) seem to have this expectation that a fantasy world MUST be consistent with our world if one or more of its natural laws seem in concordance with our own. That stars must be giant masses radiating (they could be small magic globes 1000′ up, spots in a firmament, or whatever). That a moon that seems to be a sphere (well…is a circle with a glowing crescent shaped-part and a darkened ellipsoid) from our perspective must, in fact, be a sphere. A lot of fantasy novels include worlds that have gravity and mostly-normal light, but do not have moons/suns/planets/stars that operate as per our world.
Furthermore, a lot of writers/developers create a set of astronomical rules for their worlds that never actually make it into their writing for one reason or another (not important except for them, planned to include it in a later story, etc.). The exact nature of astronomy is not critical to the story and thus never gets mentioned…but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t planned.
Your parsimony argument doesn’t really hold water. Because Terry Goodkind, ostensibly, could tell us EXACTLY what’s right and what’s wrong, all we have to offer is conjecture. You have offered one (admittedly likely, based on the intro to the books) option. Other options have been tossed out based on fantasy worlds that have been clearer about their astronomy. Back off the “gravity works, ergo I MUST be right about the stars and moon”, turn it into “well, things seem normal and he doesn’t say otherwise, so I’m probably right” and I don’t think we have an argument. I don’t think anyone’s arguing that you’re right…
It’s more likely because of the profoundly obnoxious way you present what’s “likely” as what “must be true.”
March 9th, 2009 at 9:26 am
There are many cultures, some from not so long ago, that truly believed the Moon crumbled and regrew every month as witnessed by its changing phases.
So there are those who believe that since the Moon is physically smaller when it is a crescent, then that dark area is really space and so those stars could appear inside the crescent.
So either the ancients were right or this series takes place in an alternate universe where the planet’s moon does shrink and regrow.
As Milhouse once said on The Simpsons: “If it’s on TV is HAS to be true!”
Either that or everyone who works for television and film are clueless idiots who get their science from Star Trek, if that.
March 9th, 2009 at 9:28 am
@Todd –
He’s a mythical fake-believe wizard. He can do whatever he wants. It’s fiction. It’s all made up. Anything goes. It’s whatever the author (who I am guessing is some dude that was very good at math but not very good at talking to girls in high school) wants it to be.
I’m not the author/screenwriter of the wizard show but here’s one way he did it – he used his magical fairy dust unicorn stoked magi-pen (bought from a mystical maiden troll that likes Goth music) to warp the spacetime continuum to shrink the stars. He changed the laws of physics to do it. Just like how the laws of physics and science are obviously and totally changed if you want to have, you know, a freaking wizard.
If people have a beef with the depiction of the moon/star do you not have a slight problem with the fact that there is a wizard there? Aren’t wizards by definition not “reality”? Just asking. Maybe they are real. And if they are, I need to know where I can by my unicorn wand.
March 9th, 2009 at 9:29 am
Btw Todd W, I don’t think it’s really a “wizard did it” argument, so much as a “space never was the same as ours” argument. Think of the old “Earth is a flat plate held up by a turtle”, with the sun and moon orbiting, or the firmament with all those shiny stars attached, etc., except that in this world it’s real, not a myth. So a relatively low-magic fantasy world simply originated differently. Pretty standard fantasy, really.
As mentioned previously I don’t think this is the case here, largely because I don’t think it’s mentioned in the books (although I have a hazy recollection at best) and because it was already described as a mistake by the SFX group, but I also can’t rule out the possibility that Goodkind hasn’t come up with a different cosmology (maybe) and simply hasn’t published it yet, much like how the creation stories of Middle Earth were published after Tolkien’s death.
March 9th, 2009 at 9:40 am
“by my unicorn wand….”
ergh….hate typos!
March 9th, 2009 at 9:47 am
A few years ago someone said they’d heard on the internet(s) that Mars would appear in the sky just as big as the Moon.
My reply: WHAT!!!??? Run for your lives!!! Oh come to think of it never mind.
(No need to explain quite what that would have meant.)
March 9th, 2009 at 9:47 am
Oh c’mon Phil, railing about not only scientific inaccuracies in a lame fantasy show, but OBVIOUS ones? Weak. Even a child would have seen that and known what’s wrong with it, I really don’t think it’s worthy of an adult getting bent out of shape over.
March 9th, 2009 at 9:58 am
@Geomancer and Cheyenne
My comments were primarily directed at those who were claiming that a wizard could have manipulated things, not at those claiming an alternate-rules-of-physics idea.
As to the author making things a certain way “just ’cause”, that’s typically due either to a lack of knowledge or forethought about some detail, or the mark of a hack. Either way, it’s sloppy. For a work to be good and believable, those things that are different from what the audience understands (e.g., wizards and dragons exist), there needs to be some reason behind it that the author has actually thought about. In fact, there is a lot of stuff that a good author will work out about what is going on in the world that the end audience never even sees, simply to make the work more consistent and believable. Change too many things and you risk alienating your audience to a degree that they won’t want to continue reading to the end.
Now, Goodkind may simply have described there being three stars in the sky that will disappear behind the moon, and left if at that. Maybe he even mentioned that it was a crescent. I doubt that he had much input into the SFX. So, the criticism has nothing to do with Goodkind or the world he created, but rather the world that the production artist and visual effects people created. They messed up. Why offer apologetics for it? Coming up with apologetics about why it could be possible then just brings up even more questions, requiring more apologetics and so on.
At any rate, yeah, it is a little quibble, but it’s part of what BA was founded on. Phil’s pointed out astronomical mistakes in a lot of other films. Why make up excuses for the SFX team for this one? Just because it’s a fantasy world?
On a side note, Cheyenne, why such a derogatory tone toward those who write or enjoy the fantasy genre? Why the stereotypes? Did a goth-girl hurt your feelings?
j/k
March 9th, 2009 at 10:06 am
Meh, this is tame. In the books the ‘hero’ rips out a bad guy’s spine through his stomach. The bad guy continues to fight for several more seconds before dying. The Moon/Star anomaly doesn’t have much on that
March 9th, 2009 at 10:09 am
I think many comments are missing the point here. Whether this is a fantasy world or not where the rules of physics apply or not, we must ask ourselves: Is the person(s) who created the visual for this scene really that clueless about astronomy? It’s highly likely that the answer is “yes.”
Furthermore, someone else (presumably the director and producer) saw the visual and were either too clueless to notice the flaw, or didn’t give a damn (my guess is, if they did know better, that they thought the audience would be confused by the stars disappearing behind the dark limb, or that it would look less dramatic, and figured most of their audience wouldn’t have a clue). Sad either way.
And, for those who are complaining about Phil choosing this as a topic, I say this: It’s what Bad Astronomy SHOULD be about, fer Pete’s sake! Even if most(?) adults would see three stars in front of the Moon and immediately say WTF?, kids (who are likely the primary audience of a show like this) won’t, and such wrongness chips away, bit by bit, at any correct intuition they are struggling to develop about the universe.
Slightly off topic, but here’s another case of “Moon abuse” that raises my hackles: I noticed recently that the Weather Channel seems to have finally replaced the Moon image they use as a graphic on their forecasts for overnight weather. The old one was from the shot taken by Apollo astronauts half way around the Moon, a side of the Moon never seen from the Earth. The new one is a correct Moon (I’ll forgive its failure to correctly depict libration.)
Sadly, the graphic they use for the “current Moon phase” on their web page is still the Apollo view, with Mare Crisium (which is always near the Moon’s northwest limb) appearing almost smack in the center of the lunar disc. Grrrr.
Keep up the good work, Phil. The job is never done.
March 9th, 2009 at 10:16 am
@Todd -
I understand what you are saying but, well, I really don’t see the point of it. It’s fantasy – and it’s not even good fantasy at that. So who really cares about this? Actually, judging by the amount of comments it looks like a lot do – so I think I should probably go away from this one (BA writes about a lot of interesting things – I think I’ll muddle about in those other waters).
Yeah, I think I was a bit over the line with my comment about how the author probably couldn’t get girls in high school. I mean, $5 I’m right, but it was a bit uncalled for.
But yes, I goth girl did hurt my feelings. I joined the Star Trek club, bought all black clothes, totally EMO’d out, and she didn’t even look at me.
I’m going for biker chicks next.
March 9th, 2009 at 10:19 am
@Chris – Regarding the icon that the weather channel uses – Now THAT is a moon picture/issue that is actually interesting!
March 9th, 2009 at 10:23 am
@Cheyenne
Try to get some more use out of those black clothes, huh? And really, black clothes for the Star Trek club? That was your mistake. You needed to get a red or mustard-yellow jumpsuit with black trim. Tsk, tsk, tsk.
I think Chris A. summed it up nicely.
Well, only Mr. Goodkind can answer that, but looking at his bio on Wikipedia, I see that he had some learning issues in school, didn’t complete college, and worked a number of manual and craft jobs. His web site also has some of this info: “Besides a career in wildlife art, he has been a cabinet maker and violin maker, and he has done restoration work on rare and exotic artifacts from around the world.” Oh, and he is married, so it appears he fared well in the girl department.
March 9th, 2009 at 10:35 am
@Todd – OK. I’ll concede that you have more “right” than me on this one. Looks like I’m off the mark. I’ll admit it. I get what Chris A and you are saying on the re-read. I mean, I still think it’s really a minor, minor issue but I’m wrong on it. Ugh, and now I feel bad for making fun of the author. Boo on me.
Mustard-yellow jumpsuit eh? Done. I’m off to go find a babe who is a biker chick AND Goth. I’m either going to score huge or will be left for dead in Tijuana in a week. Either way, I’ll have an epic story.
March 9th, 2009 at 10:38 am
@Cheyenne
Just make sure you get the astronomical visuals correct in the movie version.
March 9th, 2009 at 10:55 am
I wish I hadn’t come back to this post! So many weird complaints against Phil — and this is his most on-topic post in a looooong time!
Those who keep defending such a silly error are fooling themselves. It isn’t the point, that things in some fantasy show should behave as they do in our universe, it’s that it’s completely inconsistent with any interpretation:
If the stars are in front of the moon, how is the crescent going to cover them? Just because it’s brighter? Even if you count that, it’’s not even wide enough to cover all 3 simultaneously.
Are the stars behind the moon? So, it’s transparent? But the crescent part is reflective? Or perhaps it’s somehow generating light of its own? That seems needlessly complicated! Also, there’s still the problem of it not being wide enough to cover all three.
Admit it… this is a mistake. A silly mistake. Not a big deal, but it’s Bad Astronomy, whatever the universe. And this same mistake can be seen in many non-fantasy shows, so it’s quite common in popular culture, and is worth correcting.
March 9th, 2009 at 11:19 am
And how often does a photo of Mercury from Mariner 10 get used for our Moon in ads? Twice at least as far as I know.
And the paperback version of Apollo 13 (originally called Lost Moon until the Ron Howard film version came out in 1995) had Netune and Triton in crescent form taken by Voyager 2 in 1989 on its cover!
March 9th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
hey I like seeker!
And Bruce Spence is a terrific actor (Zedd). And ummm, yeah it’s fantasy, don’t hear any one complaining about diskworld on the back of elephants and a giant sea turtle in the recent “Hogfather” special…
March 9th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
Don’t know if others have already mentioned this, but some Eastern Country’s national flags have a reality problem with crescent moons too.
Go figure. (Or as I (still) tell my offspring, “Look it up”)
Ivan.
March 9th, 2009 at 12:54 pm
Geez. And here I wonder if Phil has been subtly trolling you all.
After all, the frikking article title is ‘Seeking *LEGENDARY* bad astronomy’.
March 9th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
I saw this while watching the episode and cringed too. But the story is set in a magical universe. Obviously it’s not stars in front of the moon, but some other magical phenomenon that just looks really stupid.
As an aside, the books are way better than this tv adaptation. The show is based off Wizard’s First Rule, the first book in the set, by Terry Goodkind.
There are 11 books total, and I’d say #1 is fairly cliche fantasy, but sets up the rest of the series quite well.
March 9th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
@ Todd W
Ok, I think further clarification has helped on this. I honestly don’t know exactly what Goodkind wrote (or even if this scene came from his books vs. having come from a screenwriter instead), so all I can speak to is the likelihood of an SFX mistake and the possibility that somewhere, Goodkind may have decided on alternate cosmological mechanisms…neither of which you were arguing against, so I guess that’s settled. I disagree that it’d necessarily be “sloppy” to just make it up. It could be based on existing mythos (plenty of ‘em) or just made up for the heck of it. I don’t mind people making up entirely different cosmologies/laws of physics/etc. for their fantasy world, whether because they just don’t know enough about astronomy (reasonable for a fantasy fiction author, I think…less so for sci-fi) or because they just wanted something different. Either way, however, it’s a matter of personal taste and I’m not gonna argue that.
Oh, and I don’t mind Phil railing about it, or it being argued about here at all. I only jumped in because I thought the “real life works this way therefore fantasy MUST” argument that popped up was worth arguing against. Otherwise I’d have just read in amusement.
@ Chris A
Oh, you’re right re: someone(s) who made the scene being clueless about astronomy. Whether SFX or director or Goodkind, it certainly doesn’t match our universe.
And to toss my 2 cents in – the show is pretty bad, although not the worst fantasy I’ve seen. I even enjoyed an episode or two. I enjoyed the books, although they weren’t fantastic. I can also see how others wouldn’t, particularly if they don’t want to read graphic gore/sex/language. And – DEFINITELY not for kids. The show might be aimed at young adults, but I’ve only seen it on post-primetime (in the timeslots previously devoted to such gems as “Sheena, Queen of the Jungle”, and the Canadian “Lost World” series that started with Prof. Challenger and ended up involving ninjas, aliens (I think), Atlanteans, and other awful decisions by the writers. Imo btw, Seeker isn’t close to as bad as that schlock.
March 9th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
Maybe someone replaced the moon with a smooth mirror ball, and that’s the Summer Triangle reflected in it.
March 9th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
Definitely Moon based “lasers.” One is Moon Unit Alpha, and the other is Moon Unit Zappa. I think the third one is a shark with a freaking “laser” on it’s head.
March 9th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
I know this is a fantasy thing but I have but what if it were Not fantasy… I think that may be a view from about 50 years in the future… those are the three primary locations of the Helium 3 production on the moon.
Or maybe just the three largest settlements on that side.
March 9th, 2009 at 9:09 pm
@Nigel Depledge: Yes it is. That picture brought “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” right to mind even though it’s a forest setting.
If it’s just a bit of sloppiness from the FX department, it is still right to call them on it. Tolerating sloppiness leads only to more sloppiness especially from people who are over prone to sloppiness in the first place.
March 9th, 2009 at 9:36 pm
Woo hoo! This is like total “classic” Bad Astronomy here. Awesome.
I, like many of the commenters here, immediately thought of the Phoenix lights or those other “v” UFOs… Clearly the wizard was getting all his wizardry mojo from the space aliens.
March 10th, 2009 at 5:30 am
Geomancer said:
But Goodkind’s do not. So, your point was what, exactly?
March 10th, 2009 at 5:35 am
Winter Solstice Man said:
No, this doesn’t wash.
The ancients who believed the moon actually did crumble (any references, BTW?) were simply wrong, and they would never have observed stars between the “horns” of a crescent moon.
The alternate universe thing is just another retcon. The universe of Goodkind’s stories is quite clearly our world + magic. Light and gravity behave exactly as they do in our world.
March 10th, 2009 at 5:42 am
Cheyenne said:
You obviously don’t read much stuff with wizards in it.
What you describe is utterly beyond the capabilities of any of the characters in Goodkind’s stories.
Godlike powers do not make good drama. I know of no recently published stories where characters have the kind of power you describe.
March 10th, 2009 at 5:51 am
Cheyenne said:
Well, judging from the number of posts you have made, you obviously care.
But, actually, such details can have a huge impact. I have never seen this show, and, judging from feedback that I have read, I don’t think I ever will. However, let’s assume it was a good adaptation of Goodkind’s book – in this case, enjoyment requires a suspension of disbelief to accept the magical stuff that happens. Such obvious errors as having those stars seemingly in front of the unlit face of the moon can damage the suspension of disbelief and spoil the enjoyment.
March 10th, 2009 at 5:55 am
Rift said:
This is a key point. Pratchett goes to considerable length to explain these differences between his invented world and our real one.
IIRC, Goodkind barely mentions the stuff in the sky. It’s background.
March 10th, 2009 at 5:58 am
AJ said:
No. Obviously, it’s meant to be stars beyond the moon (this is what the dialogue is about, after all). And equally obviously, the SFX crew screwed it up.
March 13th, 2009 at 5:48 am
In your case, at least this happened in a movie…
In my case, worse! this same misconception was publish in newspaper and asking people to go out and look at this “wonder”
http://mydarksky.org/2008/12/01/lunar-smiley-face/
April 5th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
My favourite thing about this picture is that the moon looks so good, you can CLEARLY tell it’s a SPHERE. *snicker*
I just found this same error in a Travelodge ad on Facebook (red arrow is my doing):
http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c378/freeluvfreeway/Travelodgeisretarded.jpg
August 27th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
You have a point on that picture but in reality as you have pointed out that cant really happen. though it occurs a lot in old stories and myths. the best explanation I see is that the star would be at the point of almost being occluded by the dark part of the moon, and people’s descriptions of such events or things being embellished, could be exaggerated to the point seen above.
So I would guess the best explanation would be.
1. the stars are close to the moons darker side not in the middle of it as depicted.
2. then the tricks of the eye and atmosphere would make the light seem closer together then it really is.
3.And of course stories and myths tend to exaggerate details like this to the point of absurdity.