My astrophotography in the movie Project Hail Mary (opens in new tab)

Hey everyone, I’m the astrophotographer, but I’m not OP. I’m assuming OP picked up my article and posted here and that’s ok! So I quickly created an account here to comment.

Having a quick read through the comments I just want to say thank you for the kind words! Please follow my IG (https://www.instagram.com/deepskyjourney) to see more of my photography, and the reddit article if you want to drop a comment with any questions :)

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProjectHailMary/s/NbRv3sj3fs

Cheers,

Rod Prazeres

This is incredible and wonderful news, huge congratulations! As someone who works at the intersection of design and engineering, the detail about delivering "starless versions" so the credit typography doesn't compete with the bright stars is exactly the kind of invisible technical problem-solving I love reading about on here.

On a personal note, I find it very refreshing to hear that a major studio opted for real captured photography. Love that they specifically wanted the authenticity of real narrowband data and that speaks to the production team's vision. Enjoy the premiere night, feel incredibly proud. I was already planning on watching the movie this weekend (it releases here on the 26th) and now I'm doubly excited because I know this neat little tidbit.

I'm pretty sure this "Dad did something crazy" moment is going to be a core memory for your kids. Congrats!

Somewhat related, nature photographer/youtuber Danni Connor had her recording of a red squirrel used in the movie Dune (Part 1) for the sound of the desert mouse (muad'dib). Her interviewing with (Oscar-winning) sound designer Mark Mangini on it:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtfzjehDg74

* transcript: https://otter.ai/u/PA9dbWFA7BgPgLZN9CSo1WFAjXk

* https://www.iflscience.com/wildlife-photographers-viral-squi...

* https://markmangini.com/Mark_Mangini/Blog/Entries/2021/11/7_...

Story of her 'adopting' the squirrels:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tDlh62AVPo

The name of the squirrel is "Baby Pear"; her viral tweet:

* https://twitter.com/DaniConnorWild/status/127534941750838476...

Incredible work, OP. What a proud feeling you must have. Congrats!!

My wife and I saw the movie this weekend, we thought it was great. I adored the book, yet I recognize a book can’t be perfectly translated to the screen.

I thought the directors did a good enough job at translating the sci-fi into something the masses would enjoy.

Kudos to you

Amazing! Kudos to Hollywood, for going to this length to license the work, credit the author, involve him in the project. To respect realism as a goal for its own, even though "no one will notice" and a similar image might be "just a prompt away." I know how common is the latter these days.

This just warms my heart and gives me hope. First aside from the fact this book got me back into reading, and the movie is one of the better book to film adaptations I've seen, and I'm so happy it gets good box office and justified word of mouth. It shows me another thing - there is demand for human generated content. It's not a big revelation, people prefer to pay a little extra for handmade although they might not really know the difference, they do it because it feels right, to support a local business, or not local, when traveling, I want to support their local business, not some conglomerate that bid the lowest and underpays their workers (until replaced by robots).

This gives me hope because as we move to a post AGI world, the only thing preventing a complete dystopia is supply and demand, if the demand for human generated work will stay and grow, we'll be ok. This is not some save the earth, be vegan, "AI is bad" message. If you follow me you know I'm all in on agentic development and try to use AI for everything I can that makes sense, but I do it to free my time to focus on the important things.

If more companies will go for the real thing, and more people like us will celebrate them for it, and vote for it with their pockets, then AI will serve humanity, and not vice versa.

p.s. If you haven't seen the movie or read the book, then read the book, then see the movie, I'm going to watch it twice, and re-read the book. Yes, it's not Dune, or Hyperion, or Children of Time, or The Left Hand of Darkness, but it's such an amazing storytelling journey that made me go back reading after a 15 years hiatus.

Astrophotography is having a bit of a moment right now. The barrier has been reduced greatly and there are some amazing OSS post processing tools.

Me and my brother just saw the movie tonight and we stayed for the credits. I thought the images were beautiful.

This reminds me of the photo of the vehicle assembly building featured in Iron Man: https://adactio.com/journal/1530/

As more an more companies lazily use AI to achieve the same thing I am doubling down on supporting -- even if I don't really care about the subject -- anything that supports actual, real human art.

That's really great news. For anyone looking for the astrophotography equipment, this is from one of his posts:

Telescope: William Optics UltraCat 76 Mount: Sky-Watcher Wave 150i Camera: ZWO ASI2600MM-Pro

A bit indiscrete, but how much does the licence cost? Is it around hundreds, 1k, 10k?

Amazing achievement, congratulations! Can't seem to be able to read it though, it greets me with "Sorry, you have been blocked" CloudFlare page — is this a HN overloading the website, or did the host accidentally block IPs from Ukraine perhaps?

That is so awesome!

As an amateur astrophotographer, I am both so envious and so happy for you. What a wonderful recognition of your talent and dedication to the craft. Kudos!

I was wondering what these images were! I wasn't sure if they were real photographs or not. They're great!

Congrats man! That's an awesome accomplishment!

Amazing movie and the end credit visuals WERE incredible!

This is kind of in line with the story, where amateur astronomers data from around the world is used to test a hypothesis.

I am currently reading the book.

Those shots are stunning. Too bad I rarely pay attention to the credits. I always assumed a lot of effort goes into them though, and this post seems to confirm it.

Dude, amazing! The images are beautiful and it's 1000 times better when you know they're real and not CGI/AI.

Great, great work! Congratulations and Bravo Zulu! Looking forward to seeing the movie this weekend.

Everyone do yourselves a favor and skip all trailers and go see this movie. It was a delight start to finish. I was so glad I knew zero what the story was.

Astrophagology?

This is amazing. Your photos are art!

This post makes me want to go see the movie now. Is it in imax? I didn’t enjoy the book (Martian was his best) but maybe I will enjoy this

Wow, congratulations!!

nice !