 I just saw a new trailer for a Wes Anderson movie came out today called Asteroid City. As an astronomer and a professor and a lover of movies, I thought it'd be kind of cool to watch the trailer and give you some of my reactions. I've watched it once and it looks really cool and there's a lot of little things in there, a lot of little nuggets that I think are interesting as an astronomer. So let's check it out. Okay, the fan pulls up in an old car. You're not here. We're not there. Color scheme's pretty crazy. Come get the girls. I have to stay here with Woodrow. I'm not the chauffeur, I'm the grandfather. Where are you? Asteroid City. Asteroid City. Wild 75. All right. All right, so let's pause here. So the title's up here. Of course, it's the Wes Anderson film. So you've got lots of symmetrical shot compositions. The color grading, the color scheme is, you know, kind of wild. I will say this has like a really like cartoonish kind of feel like the color scheme. The blue sky is like incredibly blue. It's incredibly like unnaturally blue. The sand looks like cartoon sand. It kind of has like a wily coyote sort of feel, like an old cartoon feel. All right, let's keep going. All right, hold on. We'll pause here real quick here. So we've got a science opening ceremony. I'm gonna zoom in here. We're staring at a crater, a fenced in area, for a small crater it looks like. You see it looks like saguaro cactus over there. On the left, and then the crater, which is all fenced off. So you have to obviously pay admission to go see the crater. So this kind of reminds me of like meteor crater, Behringer crater in Arizona. And on the right, you have something that looks like an observatory. It looks kind of like a hybrid of a bunch of different observatories. You've got this catwalk that kind of goes over the crater. But then the observatory itself has what looks like four radio telescopes all kind of facing the right. And then you've got what looks like sort of a traditional optical telescope, something you might see on top of a university building or something on top. The observatory is open, which is not something that usually happens during the daytime. All right, let's keep going. Okay, and then we get to the asteroid day. So it's 1955, so it's sort of the dawn right before the space race. 1947 was the Roswell incident, but 1957 is when Sputnik launches. So we're like almost to that point of the space race getting in there. Junior star gazers, so these must be like student. Lots of like rocket imagery here. Let's keep going. Cool rocket pack. So he mentions asteroid day and they celebrate asteroid day as September, what did he say, September 27th, September 23rd. What's interesting is there is an actual asteroid day, but it's June 30th. But there's an actual asteroid day, which is cool. Now their asteroid day celebrates the impact I would say 3,000 years ago. So that's pretty recently in the spectrum of asteroid impacts. Berenger crater, meteor crater in Arizona, for example, that's like 50,000 years ago. And that's one of the best preserved and sort of newest large crater impact craters in the world. So 3,000 years ago, it's interesting that it's an extremely specific date. I think that's funny that they know exactly the date, 3,000 or whatever years ago. And then if you look down here in the middle in the center of frame, there is the meteoritic space ore, which I think comes up in another shot here in a second. You're right, mate. There we go, yeah. Okay, so this is meteoritic space ore, which is kind of funny. Again, it looks very cartoonish. Like it's like the platonic ideal from like a Looney Tunes cartoon of what an asteroid or a space rock looks like. So it says long felt to be a lunar splinter fragmented from the lesser moon of the hypothetical planet Magnavox 27. There's no hypothetical planets named Magnavox 27 from my thoughts of Magnavox as a television. And in the 1950s of Magnavox, I think it's definitely a television. Between the cartoonish color grading and this Magnavox 27, my fan theory so far is that we're in some sort of cartoon universe. I don't know if that's what Wes Anderson is going for here. So it's now considered a rogue pygmy cometet. This is not a thing. I don't know what a cometet is. I think that means a miniature comet maybe. It's not clear what they're going for with this. I don't know if this is supposed to be relative to a point in time when astronomers might say something like a pygmy comet. This is not a phrase that we would use now. All right, let's keep going. All right, we've got a kid holding up some kind of laser gun and blows up a disc maybe. That laser gun kind of looks like a, kind of looks like a eight millimeter video camera with like blasters attached to it or something. It's kind of funny. All right, now we're in a diner. And then, okay, the exterior shot of this diner. This looks like, very much like a Looney Tunes, like a wildly coyote explosion. Like this looks like the real life version of something out of Looney Tunes. So again, kind of reinforcing my theory that this is maybe a cartoon world. Holy Toledo, that's Mitch Campbell. All right, Swiss mountain camera. In the brothel, who gets amnesia and makes a pedigree. So it's like we've got some actors. I don't know why nobody else liked it. So now we have a night shot of this observatory slash crater as well. It says now viewing of the astronomical ellipses. Astronomical ellipses, the ellipses, I guess this would be the like the spheres in the sky or something like the discs in the sky. I mean ellipses, ellipses of shape, right? Everything orbits in sort of an ellipse. So I'm not sure what they would be having a viewing for at midnight, especially with these giant stadium lights. The stadium lights I guess presumably are there for illuminating the center of the crater. So maybe there's something in the middle of the crater. Now you can see that, I pause it here, but when I play you'll see that the radio telescopes are all turning. They're all sort of turning together. And when big arrays like the very large array when they adjust to their pointing, all the telescopes look like this. They sort of move together in sync, which is always very like beautiful to watch. What are those pulses? All right, so now we've got a daytime shot from inside the observatory looking out at the telescopes. So this kid asks what the pulses mean. And what I'm noticing is these telescopes, they're all alt-as type mounts, which is very typical for radio telescopes. These four telescopes might be used to do radio interferometry, which where you use multiple beams to reconstruct an image. But you don't, each telescope, each dish doesn't actually take an image. They're all sort of pointing together, although they don't all necessarily look like they're pointing exactly in the same spot. And they're all moving, right? Like they're all sweeping around in the sky, which looks more like radar. And so this makes me wonder if they're searching for something, if they're like trying to detect a signal, as opposed to they're trying to observe something or track something. And I was asking about pulses. We have this kind of reader board, which flashing these sort of like symbolic codes, which look like numbers maybe, you know, this kind of draws to mind close encounters, you know, something like this where you've got the aliens responding with lights and sounds. What? Oh, the beeps and the lips. Beeps and blips. I like that though. That seems very tongue-in-cheek, like a Star Trek-esque kind of set that nobody knows what they mean. They just kind of lights on the enterprise. They're just making noise and nobody knows what they mean. But our information about outer space may no longer be completely accurate. Anyway, there's still only nine planets. Okay, so now we're at some kind of lecture or school maybe. We've got a diagram of the solar system, which looks pretty good. Mercury, Venus, Earth, with its moon, Mars, asteroid belt, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. So everything is where it should be. Saturn's got rings. Jupiter has a big band, doesn't have a lot of the banding structure that we would expect to see. There's no big spot on Jupiter. But again, this is a very simplified, sort of chalkboard sketch. It's the solar system that inspires people. So the kid raises his hand and he says, except for now there's an alien. And it looks like now we get this close-up on this green flying saucer coming down. Looks like it's landing on people in the middle of the crater during asteroid day. And so it looks like there's a bunch of kids with boxes on their heads and this spaceship is coming down. And now everybody's looking up. All right, so the military then is very concerned. What's happening now? I like that the date on the check has been crossed out like they were trying to award it before. I don't know. Okay, and now we've got a team of investigators looking in the crater. One thing I'll notice is that the walls of this crater don't look really like a crater. Like they don't have sort of the profile you'd expect from an impact crater. Like you do see on the moon or a meteor crater, you can't see the sort of jagged rocks around the lip. But then there's usually a smoother profile down into the basin. And this looks like a, you know, like almost like a volcanic kind of vent sort of shape. It doesn't really look like a crater that you wouldn't expect to see. Maybe they've dug it out. This is definitely something that happened a little bit at Berencher crater, at Meteor crater. The people went looking, they tried to like find the meteor, the remnant of the meteor. And you can go into the visitor center and see the remnant of the meteor. It doesn't look like this. Looks kind of like an iron potato or something. It's not spherical. This crater is not very big. I mean, right? Like it looks like the size of a basketball court or something. Whereas Meteor crater, it's like a mile across or something. It's quite large. The rock that created Meteor crater that big of an impact, that was like 50 meter rock, a pretty big rock that hit. So this small of a crater like certainly could have been created by a small impactor, a small asteroid, but it wouldn't have survived. Like it would have exploded or been destroyed when it hit the ground. So the fact that it's just sitting there, that tells us something that's unusual about this, something special about this rock because that does not what normally happens when a rock comes to the atmosphere and creates this giant hole in the ground. There's not usually much of the rock left. I don't like the way that guy looked at us. The alien. How did he look like we're doomed? So now they're talking about the aliens just saying, I don't like the way that guy looked at us. So the thing that interests me about this, right, is that we spent the first part talking about asteroids and impacts and now we've moved into talking about aliens. A lot of the work we do in our institute using large surveys, large telescope surveys to look for asteroids, but also one of the new areas of work is using these surveys to look for signs of alien life in the universe. So I like that we were playing on all these themes here. This is what sort of draws me to it. But okay, let's keep going and see what other astronomy comes up here. Looks like they're all having cocktails. They keep us in Asteroid City. Okay, everybody looks like they're quarantined, trapped in Asteroid City. Looks like they've turned the little cafe into a quarantine spot. They've got like a military quarantine situation going on. So this is very like E.T. kind of vibes. The world will never be... The Eric Plains meteorite. He's the same. That's an alien doing Juppie Jacks. That's an alien at Toppat. Once again, we've got a telescope that's open during the daytime, which is always not a great way to operate your telescope. I mean, it's fine provided you don't look at the sun. Telescope dome looks very standard, like something you again might see on top of a science building. This mount on this telescope does look very unusual. I mean, it looks like it rotates around and then it tips up and down. The problem with a mount like this, like it's fine for just pointing a telescope and lots of like amateur telescopes have mounts like this. But if you were to mount a camera onto a telescope like this, as it tracks objects to the sky, the sky appears to rotate. And so you have to have a third motor or a third axis of rotation to we say de-rotate the sky. And so with a telescope mount like this, you'd need something in the back to sort of de-rotate the telescope. So this is kind of an unusual setup and also the pipes and everything holding a telescope look very unstable. So a mount like this would also tend to shake a lot. You'd have a lot of vibration. So this would not be a good sort of mount for a telescope because of this big, you know, these little long arms would act like springs. The telescope would wobble. And so your pictures would not be as sharp with a telescope like this. The meaning of life. Maybe there is one. Are you married? The meaning of life, it's a good question. What's on my kids? You're saying your mother died three weeks ago. Let's say she's in heaven. Which doesn't exist for me, of course, but you're a Episcopalian. In my loneliness. I had heard that Bill Murray, who is in like every Wes Anderson film, couldn't end up shooting because he had contracted COVID right before filming. And so I'm wondering my hypothesis here is that Tom Hanks is stepping in as the Bill Murray sort of character that would kind of, you know, sort of elder statesman in the movie. I learned to give complete and unquestioning faith to the people I love. I don't know if that includes you, but it included my daughter and your four children. So now we're at sort of this carnival, this doomsday ferris wheel, spacecraft siding booth, alien parking, 25 cents. This feels like a version, I like the little kid with the helmet. And this guy is like very unimpressed little kid with his homemade space suit. This reminds me very much of that scene and contact when they're heading out to the machine and there's people all like camped out. You guys feel more at home outside the Earth's atmosphere? The Glactatron Limitless Scope Model. This is obviously not a real telescope, but it looks like it's built out of some real vintage telescope parts or at least the props department did a good job of making it look like a real telescope. So it looks really cool. The sort of focal reducing optics in the end look kind of cool. And you got sort of focusing and adjustment knobs here. This all looks pretty cool. Sounds like this little kid's happier outside the Earth's atmosphere. I get that. Maybe she's an alien. Me too. They're strange aren't they? They're children. Strange kids. They're the normal people. They'll all be astronomers. That's correct. It's true. All right, we got another cool Wes Anderson shot on the train top. Ridiculous cast. Ensemble cast. Did I say yes? You didn't say anything. And if we pause here, you can see in his photography booth here in the background, he's got all this development equipment. He's clearly taking pictures. He's got the explosion. He's got the sort of nuclear bomb looking explosion, the mushroom cloud in the back. For some reason, this kind of reminds me of sort of an apocrypal story of Enrico Fermi at the Trinity test. So one of the first atomic blast tests, the Trinity test, he dropped his paper in it, like measure the amount of time it took for the blast wave to reach him. And he used that to estimate the strength, the yield of the nuclear blast. We would call this like an order of magnitude or what we need something that's called back of the envelope estimate of something. But I don't know. Maybe he's using his camera to figure out the blast yield here. I meant, yes, my mouth didn't speak. All right. All right, so that's the trailer. It's pretty cool. Some kind of dream-like world, some kind of dream-like story about aliens, about life, about asteroids. Like maybe the story is about a kid who dreams of outer space, which I think is very relatable, as somebody who still dreams about outer space. There's lots of good details in here. I really like all the details of the props they've got obviously lots of good sort of mid-century futurism. The little ray gun skeet shooters set up. The telescope props are all very cool looking. Even though I don't think this film is gonna have a lot of deep astronomy in it and probably it won't have a lot of nuanced detail about SETI. I mean, it seems like the aliens just show up above the crater one day and then talk to them. Maybe that little kid was one of the aliens. Anytime you've got A-list celebrities that are like helping get the word out about science and sci-fi, real astronomy and observations and also the connections between things like asteroids and SETI. Like, I think it's good fun. So, yeah, I don't think this film is gonna be teaching anybody a lot of practical astronomy but I had fun watching that and I look forward to seeing it.