In the week when nerds make their annual pilgrimage to San Diego Comic-Con, I couldn’t resist this little tidbit on science fiction meets science fact. Last week, a poster was revealed for the upcoming Star Wars movie Rogue One. As you can see, the Death Star looms large over a surface-bound skirmish. While fully acknowledging that the Death Star doesn’t exist as such and so obviously computer graphics and Photoshop were involved in rendering this image for our galaxy, one might wonder if it would be physically possible to ever photograph such an image in the land of Luke and Leia. As it happens, optically speaking the poster is a plausible image–although it raises some red flags about the gravity involved in this scenario. The math and the physics aren’t particularly complicated and the conclusion isn’t terribly profound, but I like to be reminded every now and again that our human intuitions need to be sanity checked.
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