I want to take this opportunity to thank you and the amazing CGI/FX team at Battlestar for the wonderfully consistent work on BSG, despite the hectic schedules and the fast turn-around time that you guys need to meet when working on a television budget. (I do have issues with the CGI for “Daybreak,” but I won’t go into that. I understand that the special effects were finished a day before the episode aired, so I understand it.)

While I understand the astronomy or science buffs for being a bit miffed over the so-called “starfield clues,” they need to understand that the sole purpose of a television show is to entertain and, from a financial standpoint, make cubits for the network. (I believe the field you are in is referred to as the “entertainment business,” and as a business there are investments and the expectation is that there is a return on said investments in the form of recouping the initial investment and, ultimately, profit.) If these fans wanted real hard science fiction, then they could go to the library and look into the works of Carl Sagan, Issac Asimov or other golden age SF writers to read. Further, they could simply watch the Discovery, History Channel and other educational shows.) The fact that you guys and gals cared enough to be consistent under hectic television schedules and other stresses shows your true dedication and passion for the art of making a television show.

The sad part about these fans (which are less than 0.01% of us, but yet are the most vocal) is that they have demonstrated a complete lack of understanding about what the people in the entertainment trenches of television production go through. I do not for one minute believe that this disrespect is intentional, but rather out of sheer ignorance and, borne from that, misunderstanding. I really wish the fans could go through what I experienced up in Vancouver when prepping for the first BSG auction before the production wrapped after “The Plan” and “Face of the Enemy,” as then they would have had their eyes opened to what actually goes on behind the scenes. Even my personal minimal exposure to this process has nurtured a greater respect for what EVERYONE in the production staff goes through just to make the show happen! Color me “biased,” but at least my opinion is informed.

I’ve always maintained that there are very few fans who (dangerously) read far too much into things in the show, whether it be the way something is said, or into the minute details in the background. And while it’s easy to say that “people will always nitpick at everything and so you must account for that,” it needs to be understood and accepted that you guys cannot account for these things. The conditions that, again, you’ve laid out in your blog post demonstrate that this is impossible. You will never please all the nitpickers, and it isn’t worth your time to do so.

So, yes, the constellations in the Tomb of Athena were a scientific mistake as Grazier admitted and, yes, Gaeta’s comment about them matching in Earth 1’s orbit were also a mistake… however, BSG is an “elseworld” and should be treated as such. After all, the Cylons don’t exist, there’s no William Adama, there’s no “other Earth” and it is all a work of fiction that miraculously lasted longer than its original source material. So what’s to say that the constellations seen in the Tomb of Athena WEREN’T the constellations over the Kobollian Cylons’ homeworld? Hmm…

Regardless, you all have done well for yourselves. Sure there were mistakes, but as BSG is a mirror of the human condition, this is to be expected… and, in a perverse sort of way, cherished and respected.

To those of us who complain and belabor things ad nauseum (and, honestly, to no point)… Be thankful that we received four seasons, two movies, webisodes and a spin-off. It could be worse. You could be watching Galactica 1980 for four seasons as we could have a spin-off with just the descendants of the “Super Scouts” jumping for joy as they throw seeds into trenches made by lasers as they sing a space scout chantey.

So say we all and thanks for all the fish.

Let me stress I have been impressed from the very beginning on the quality of the FX on this show. The ship models always seemed flawless to me, and even shots where you had the CGI Centurions on screen with human actors, I was always convinced there was a true interaction there (unlike say Jar Jar with Ewan McGregor and Liam Neeson, which was the least of the issues there, but I digress).

Again, it’s only because there was so much care given to the details of the show that we expected the constellations to mean something. Otherwise, an excellent job, and if the same company is doing the FX for Caprica, then I certainly know the visuals on that show will be to par.

As a professional astronomer and teacher, I was bugged a little by the uniformity of colors of the stars. Meh. Whatever. I never saw it as all that important of a teachable opportunity in the context of the show, so I dig the little argument about color contrast with the ships in the Fleet. That said, I would still like to know what sort of discussion took place among the writers/FX team about putting Orion in there at all, since it’s probably the most easily recognizable constellation. (I remember smiling about seeing the Big Dipper in there a few times too. :P )

I was also a little grumbly, after the reveal at the end of the series, that Orion kept showing up *at all*, since the apparent positions of nearby stars can move quite a significant amount in 150,000 years. In the local Galaxy, the velocity dispersion of stars is about 30 km/sec (also, roughly the speed that Earth orbits the Sun!), so over 150,000 years, stars will drift relative to one another by roughly 15 light years. Stars are usually a couple of light years apart, on average, so only the most nearby stars would move significantly, say, up to about 100-ish light years distant.

The cool thing is that all of the brightest stars in Orion are extremely luminous giant stars, and are all quite distant, so *would not have appeared to move much*. In fact, of the “recognizable” stars, the most nearby, Bellatrix (gamma Ori, the right/west shoulder), is still at about 250 LY, but given the fact that in this guesstimate we could be moving mostly toward or away from it just as easily as anything else, it might not appear to move at all. At the risk of taking this one step too far, I did just run the numbers on Wikipedia real fast and, given the current proper motion of Bellatrix on the sky, it would have moved less than one degree in the “New Earth” sky in the last 150 kyr.

Now, I don’t mean to be over-analyzey and nit-picky about it in the context of the story, but I just think it’s pretty rad that Orion was still Orion back then! :) [And re-reading some of the above comments, Orion would still look quite a bit like Orion from a pretty big region of space, as well!]

After being satisfied about that now, several weeks on, the biggest astrophysically cringe-worthy moment for me was when Adama mentioned about New Earth being “one million light years away” from their original homeworlds. Now, I’ve appreciated the lack of treknobabble throughout the majority of the show just as much as any of the rest of you, and I’ve always had burning questions about the Fleet’s jump-able radius, etc., but it leaves me a little puzzled about the word choice here…

Was Adama meaning to use hyperbole to make the point, or was he actually making a statement of fact? I’d lean totally toward the hyperbole argument *except* for the fact that he said “one million” instead of simply “a million”, which would imply that he was being a bit more quantitative about his statement. However, there are some good arguments against this. (Now for some more analytical astronomy content!!) Our Galaxy is roughly 100,000 LY across. Presumably, the Fleet has been staying within the Galaxy this whole time (I never noticed them in a star field which would suggest otherwise) so they couldn’t have actually been “one million light years away” from Caprica.

Well, now you might reasonably say “okay, so what if their light-year is different than ours? If the Caprican year is shorter than the (New) Earth year, then perhaps they can still say that the Galaxy is 1 MLY across?” I say that’s very unlikely. For this to work, the Caprican/Colonial year would have to be at *least* 10 times shorter than our year. Shorter than that, and it means you get to put more than 1 MLY across the Galaxy. Here’s the kicker, though: for the Caprican year to be much shorter, it would have to orbit it’s host star much closer than Earth orbits the Sun. In fact, in our limiting case that the Caprican year has to be at least 10 times shorter than our own, it would have to be no longer than 365/10 ~ 36 Earth days long! That’s pretty short, but, remember that Mercury orbits the Sun in 88 days. For this to work out, Caprica would have to orbit it’s host star even closer than Mercury, making it totally uninhabitable if their star was anything like our Sun, which by all reasonable estimations, it is. The habitable zone of a less massive star would be closer in, but then the speedy planet would need to orbit even more near to the star because of the lower stellar mass to get the same short year, and the star would be really red anyway. More massive stars are similarly out of the question.

Since in all likelihood, the Caprican year is quite similar to our Earth year, my best guess is that we should read Adama as being hyperbolic about the actual distances here, even if I personally don’t like the choice of “one” over “a”. So was is sloppiness on the part of the writers? Olmos’ reading of the line (i.e., it was a different line on paper)? Perhaps. But I say that you can cut them all some slack since, in any case, it’s not really inconsistent with anything if you read Adama’s line as hyperbole in the first place — which you should, given the tone of the rest of this lovely scene!

Out of curiosity, I had read some of those posts on star positions over the last season and, not to put down the authors’ enthusiasm, but I thought that often they were really reaching. And now look what I’ve gone and done! Shame on me. “It’s the characters, stupid!” (But that’s still what I’m saying anyway, so…no shame.)

The zodiac issue was confounded by the inclusion of the recognisable constellations in the Tomb of Athena. They became part of the plot. We were told that the real stars were out there to be found and that they were important, you can’t blame the astronomers in the audience for getting excited when they started to appear. This was a high quality show, with realistic physics and an eye for detail, why wouldn’t the sky have meaning? Some of thetant flak may be excessive, but I certainly understand where the disapointment stems from.

Tracking the constellations must have been a labour of love for some fans and probably brought a great deal of pleasure while it lasted. There’s no crime in that, and I’d suggest that those yelling ‘GET A LIFE!’ on a sci-fi blog take a moment to assess what makes their own life so much more meaningful. Imagine the utter trash we might have on TV in a world without the nitpickers constantly demanding more from their entertainment, they should be applauded for their efforts, not ridiculed.

Normally I would indeed not have expected the post team to be paying a lot of attention to the star patterns. However, a few things happened, some by accident, some by error, that led many to believe you were paying attention to them, and that triggered people to look harder for clues.

If you had used Earth stars all the time, then everybody would have quickly said, “Oh, they are just using stock software, nothing to see here, move along.” It was the switching from random stars to Earth stars that said, “That looks deliberate!” Random stars all along (except in the final episode scene at real Earth) would have been easy to do and caused no consternation.

In addition, the use of random stars at 13th colony Earth seemed especially deliberate. Ah, this is not the true Earth it (correctly) told people — until the real Earth stars showed up in lots of places.

Finally, perhaps due to bad luck, Orion appeared front and center in a few scenes. Orion is the 2nd most easily identified constellation, and in fact it was so prominent that it was unlikely to be by chance. Not impossible, though. So this was just some bad luck.

You didn’t know this, but to people who do know their astronomy, and there are more than a few out there, this was a big flashing light.

However, I think the actual mistake was this. Just as when Ron Moore discovered people were reading way too much into “Daniel,” you should have asked him to clarify, “people are reading way too much into the star backgrounds.” This would have been a great courtesy to fans. In fact, we would have been annoyed but generally forgiving if a warning like this had gone out after people started noticing them.

Those who know their astronomy (and this is a minority) know that the real Earth star patterns do not appear except at Earth, and they are quite distorted even at most of the nearest stars. Random star patterns would have been fine, though calculated patterns would have been cool (there are many packages that do that.) Everybody would have accepted the vagaries of time and budget constraints on this question. That minority also knows the stars change over 150,000 years, so strictly the real patterns should not ever have appeared.

But again, I’m not demanding you know that, or spend the time or money on special software. Rather, the lesson I hope this teaches is that fans will pay attention to everything, and spread what they learn on the internet, and as such, if you make the inaccuracies that time and budget demand, you should use the same internet to let people know if they are making too much of something. You would not have needed to do this if the accident had not landed Orion so squarely in view.

I tried telling folks who were invested in their star background theories, that it wasn’t going to lead anywhere. But, as you said in a comment above, perhaps they have increased interest in astronomy. (Everyone in L.A. should visit Griffith Park Observatory, for sure.)

The important work everyone should have been paying attention to was the work you guys did in the foreground. And based on the monumental work on the finale’s FX, I think you all will be clearing space on the mantle for another well deserved Emmy.

I think it’s just some tradition though dating back to the pinhole stars of pre CGI that they are always white, i mean even seeing lots of other 3d spaceship art, i almost never ever see anything but white or monochrome blue stars. I think Babylon 5 was the only exception.

Mojo, the moment I saw the RC thrusters, back in the miniseries, I said out loud: “Wow! they do respect my intelligence”. Since then BSG FX are better and better, adding lots to the story, bringing to the screen the best spacebattles since ever, and if people waste their time nitpicking starfields, I’m sorry, but they’re looking at the wrong thing.

BSG gave us the Adama Maneuver, how can I ask for more than that?