Video: A Simple Star Wars Tale

And now for something completely different.  This paper animation Star Wars video from Eric Power uses Jeremy Messersmith's mellow tune Tatooine as the background music.  It all comes together well and does a nice job summarizing the original trilogy.  I am not sure the next three movies in the series would work so well - the story may be too complex with endless moving parts.

Below are the lyrics to the song (you should already know the movies) as well as information on the artist:

Twin suns of Tatooine
Taught me everything I know
Twin suns of Tatooine
Taught me everything I know  

There's room up there for second chances
Singles are fine but doubles are fantastic
I'd like to think that there's a star for me and you
Spinning round, falling for one another  

Twin suns of Tatooine
Taught me everything I know
Twin suns of Tatooine
Taught me everything I know  

Solos are fine but duets are romantic
A pair is grand but a trio'd be disastrous
I'd like to think that there's a star for me and you
Spinning round, falling for one another

Han Solo Wasn't So Tough

A piece by Kenneth Chang in the New York Times recently noted the asteroids in our asteroid belt would be nothing like what you saw the Millennium Falcon navigate in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. Wait, George Lucas misled us?

In his entertaining and informative article, Mr. Chang produces a few figures on the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and then adds this: 

 S. Alan Stern, the principal investigator for the New Horizons mission to Pluto wrote that when his spacecraft passed through the asteroid belt in 2006, the chance of collision was “almost vanishingly small — far less than one in one billion.”

So, Lucas was exaggerating, and our spacecraft heading to the outer planets were never in jeopardy.  I feel much better.  But what about that asteroid monster?
 

Another Look at Star Wars: Destroying a Planet

Scott Manley's video does a nice job trying to make some sense of the planet destroying creations in the Star Wars movies, from the destruction of Alderaan to the latest film (Spoiler Alert!) that destroys multiple planets.  His video, How Much Power Do You Need to Destroy a Planet?, tosses in plenty of equations along the way discussing the destruction of Earth and Jupiter, but the bottom line is that the necessary energy and resulting destruction would fall outside of what Lucas and Disney have served up.  Of course, no one can be surprised, but it is interesting to speculate. 

However, the bottom line here is that you do not need a spectacular exploding planet to kill off a civilization.  All you need to destroy is the outer 1 percent and nothing will survive.  Why the overkill?  But more to the point, we already have the ability to do to ourselves what the Empire did to others.  That is a scary thought.

Star Wars Versus Close Encounters

In a recent interview with Smithsonian magazine, Richard Dreyfuss shared his opinion on the 1977 release of both Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind:

If Close Encounters had opened first, the idea of space and stories about aliens would have been lifted to a certain level of audience maturity.  And I think that some of the great writers and some of the great screenwriters would have been making films in that genre as opposed to bang-bang Star Wars and Star Wars sequels.  Close Encounters was, from the beginning to the end, about something far more intelligent, or intellectual, or uplifting...The first line for Close Encounters was 'You have nothing to fear by looking up.

It is clear that Star Wars won, as we see with the billion-dollar release of the seventh episode of the franchise.  I don't remember a sequel to Close Encounters.  But that does seem to be the way of the world and Hollywood.  And yet I am hopeful.  The release of The Martian last year was a stunning scientific film that captured everyone's imagination without light sabers and Death Stars.  And let us not forget the movie Contact, putting Carl Sagan's book of the same name onto the silver screen.  And even Star Trek can be said to be a somewhat more realistic take on human expansion into space, or at least a little more hopeful that the Star Wars version of the galaxy (or some other galaxy far, far away), and it precedes Lucas' story by a decade.  So cheer up, Richard. 

Update:  Tom Shone has an informative article in Slate that discusses the overlapping careers of Lucas and Spielberg.  It is worth a look.

Great Image: Not A Galaxy Far, Far Away

I guess NASA misses The Martian, because it like to tie into popular culture.  Well, Star Wars is here and now the Agency has a new spin on its material.  In this case, lightsabers and the Hubble Space Telescope, as shown above and discussed below:

“Science fiction has been an inspiration to generations of scientists and engineers, and the film series Star Wars is no exception,” said John Grunsfeld, astronaut and associate administrator for the NASA Science Mission directorate.  “There is no stronger case for the motivational power of real science than the discoveries that come from the Hubble Space Telescope as it unravels the mysteries of the universe."

This celestial lightsaber does not lie in a galaxy far, far away, but rather inside our home galaxy, the Milky Way. It’s inside a turbulent birthing ground for new stars known as the Orion B molecular cloud complex, located 1,350 light-years away.

There have been other tie-ins, such as the discussion with a NASA engineer about what it would take to build a Death Star.  Let's not roll out that plan just yet since presidential candidate Trump is still looking for something "huge" to resolve matters in the Middle East.  

Another Great Image: Tethys 'Eyes' Saturn

 

My first thought when seeing the image was the earlier Star Wars film where the Death Star was rounding a targeted planet.  However, this shot was taken from the Cassini spacecraft and shows the moon of Tethys.  Here is the rest of the story from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory:

The two large craters on Tethys, near the line where day fades to night, almost resemble two giant eyes observing Saturn.

The location of these craters on Tethys’ terminator throws their topography into sharp relief. Both are large craters, but the larger and southernmost of the two shows a more complex structure. The angle of the lighting highlights a central peak in this crater. Central peaks are the result of the surface reacting to the violent post-impact excavation of the crater. The northern crater does not show a similar feature. Possibly the impact was too small to form a central peak, or the composition of the material in the immediate vicinity couldn’t support the formation of a central peak.

In this image Tethys is significantly closer to the camera, while the planet is in the background. Yet the moon is still utterly dwarfed by the giant Saturn.

This view looks toward the anti-Saturn side of Tethys. North on Tethys is up and rotated 42 degrees to the right. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on April 11, 2015.

The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 75,000 miles (120,000 kilometers) from Tethys. Image scale at Tethys is 4 miles (7 kilometers) per pixel.

And let's not forget Mimas, another moon of Saturn, that has even greater resemblance to the Death Star up close.