2285: A Space Oddity (Genesis Planet)

[2046]

So I'm working on a page about planet-killers, and while I'm at it I go into the Genesis Device a little bit, since it blows 'em up real good (if even inadvertently).

Now, I'd already noticed way back when that the Genesis Planet seems to be quite a bit closer to its sun by the end of the film . . . the last scene with the BoP leaving has a huge, close sun compared to the shots of the Grissom and Enterprise arriving. I decided to cross-check with any shots from the surface, and came across something weird.

First, we have the strange-looking sunset scene David watches (no doubt wondering where the hell the atmosphere ran off to), available at Trekcore.com:

http://movies.trekcore.com/gallery/disp ... =50&pos=94

Then, there's that lovely shot I think of as Sunrise in Hell:

http://movies.trekcore.com/gallery/disp ... 53&pos=124

But then I noticed something . . . a few of the peaks and whatnot in the distance are the same. So I did an overlay just to be sure, and sure enough it's the same horizon:

http://www.st-v-sw.net/images/Trek/Movi ... verlay.jpg
(offset just a little to make the comparison clear)

So either these guys landed on the north pole, or else the planet tearing-itself-apart thing happened to include the whole place flopping all about so that its rotation seemed to nearly reverse.

Of course, the idea of landing on the north pole doesn't work, given the rapid drops-straight-down sunset we saw earlier in the film . . . and thus we're stuck with the planet shifting into reverse somehow. I don't think it was a hard rotational 180 given the long, slow pre-dawn (during which Kirk kicks various forms of Klingon ass), but certainly the sun wasn't supposed to rise there.

(Even if we don't allow for a 180, the sun is several degrees from where it ought to be . . . roughly the equivalent of the difference in sun position between summer and winter in the temperate region of Earth.)

The only other possibility I see is that the landmass they were on spun around all by itself. But that comes with its own problems. A planetary core going all wobbly-goblin might somehow produce a shift for the whole mass without someone on the surface noticing too much (just like we don't really catch on to the rotation of Earth normally), but a continent riding the merry-go-round would require that if any poor bastard was on those hills at the horizon he'd have to be hanging on tight.

But that's just my take. I could be right, or I could be smoking crack. The two may not be mutually exclusive, so any thoughts are appreciated.

[Mike DiCenso]

Maybe you're just overthinking the issue? With atmospheric destortion of lighjt that occurs in sunrises and sun sets, which often can cause a magnification effect, it would be difficult to make a case for Genesis getting closer to it's sun, particularly since your own screencaps show only a slight to moderate increase in apparent size.

There is also the issue that what you see is a magnification caused by image compression by the camera lens. Anyone who's watched a movie with a dramatic sunset where the sun appears really big as it goes below the horizon shouldn't think that the sun has some how gotten 10 times bigger, or the Earth several times closer. It's just an optical effect. The same may again be true for Genesis.
-Mike

[2046]

Indeed. Initially I was going to use the shots from the surface to show that the sun looked bigger there, too, since I remembered the sun being just way huge in the Planet Hell shot. Even after I noticed the similarity of horizon I thought for a few minutes that the Planet Hell shot was a wider view (which would naturally make the sun appear smaller), explaining the similar sun size.

Instead, though, the two suns are very similar in apparent size from the surface scenes when the field of view is taken into account . . . certainly the Planet Hell surface view shows nowhere near the sheer hugeness we see in the space view. And, given the seeming lack of atmosphere in the sunset shot, one would be hard pressed to argue any sort of atmospheric lensing.

I'll probably just mention the possibility of orbital funkiness given the space view, but mention the contradiction with the surface shot. In any case, though, the rotation of the place did go to hell in a handbasket.