ECQOs in Live Action

There's another likely ECQO in the films, by the way . . . when Obi-Wan is escaping Utapau in the newly available fighter previously owned by Grievous, the star lighting the scene is clearly much too close. As I put it on my blog in a prior post:

Similarly, the space shot that Brian makes claims about features a visible star way, way in the wrong place. For the planets to be lit by that, it would have to be what one might call an "extremely compact quasi-stellar object" (ECQO) in close orbit. Otherwise, the planets should look like the merest slivers. The only other alternative would be to argue that the field of view is profoundly monkeyed with in that scene, and even possibly being actively changed throughout it, which is a possibility but would then also render its use as an acceleration guide kaput. Given that the star moves much like the moons do, it seems it must be either an ECQO or a monkeyed scene.

Here's what I mean about the sliver . . . this is an overlay of Celestia looking at Earth with the sun in a similar position to the lower right compared to the Utapau ECQO at the upper left.


Click to Embiggify

. . . and here is the animated .gif of the star's moon-like motion:


Click to Embiggify

Put simply, it really shouldn't move along with the moons like that. The planet and moons ought to be so much closer that they wiggle about like ping-pong balls by comparison to a stationary, distant sun.

ILM did a much better job at the end of ST2, though the final pullback from Genesis for Nimoy's "final frontier" voiceover was a bit wonky. This can be attributed to artistic license and whatever weird camera tomfoolery was afoot to make it all funky-morphic.