Orphaned/Sandbox/Astronomy Tropes

Ah, fictional astronomy. The really great thing about writing is you get to make the entire Cosmos do what you want it to, even things it can't really do. Here are some shortcuts writers take related to astronomy:


 * Asteroid Thicket
 * Baby Planet
 * Binary Suns
 * Comet of Doom
 * Counter-Earth
 * Conveniently Close Planet
 * Full-Moon Silhouette
 * Gravity Sucks
 * Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale
 * The Stars Are Going Out
 * Unrealistic Black Hole
 * Weird Moon
 * Weird Sun

These overlap Physics Tropes and Space Tropes.

Unclassified Examples
Can't figure out where to put your astronomy related example? Leave it here. When we get enough like it, a new trope will begin to form. Kind of like a solar system, if you think about it.

Relative Planetary and stellar placement

 * There is an energy snack commercial where a basketball player (Lamar Odom) shows off his ability to dunk to the Moon. On his way, he tells Saturn to get out of his way. If we're suspending our disbelief enough to buy that a guy jump to the Moon, Saturn might as well be between the Earth and the Moon. The next guy says he's going to dunk on Pluto. Okay. For all we know, that might be a shorter trip than one to the Moon, in this Ficton's astronomy.
 * In the Tomb Raider movie, all the planets including Pluto (which at the time, was a planet) are aligned. Okay. Pluto's orbit is highly erratic, tilted at an angle of 17 degrees to the ecliptic and highly eccentric (being the wrong kind of ellipse). It will probably never align closely with all the other planets in the lifespan of the solar system, but you can't have a really good planetary collection without having the whole set.
 * Doctor Who: The 1996 TV movie places Gallifrey, the Doctor's home planet, some 250 million light years away from Earth, on "the other side" of the Milky Way. That's about 249.9 million light years past the other edge of it. The Milky Way is estimated to be only between 80 and 100 thousand light years across.
 * Towards the end of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter, in mid or late June, Harry is taking his astronomy O.W.L. and charting Orion. Orion is not visible in the night sky in mid or late June at any latitude. The same scene also has him looking around for Venus (which is never more than 47 degrees away from the sun) around midnight. Needless to say, he didn't do particularly well on that O.W.L.. Just as well. Muggles have to be better at something.

Made-To-Order Eclipses

 * Apocalypto features a solar eclipse. The very next night, there's a full moon, which is odd considering that an eclipse can only happen at a new moon. The Moon is obviously like a great big lightbulb a writer can turn up or down, depending on the level of light needed at night.
 * Ladyhawke: A full moon is followed a few days later by a solar eclipse, followed a few days later by a quarter moon. It is almost like this story about people turning into hawks just wasn't about correct astronomy at all.
 * Heroes has issues with eclipses. The pilot has a reasonably brief eclipse, but it's visible in both New York City and Tokyo at the same time. The eclipse that robs everyone of their powers in Season 3 is even worse; not only is it visible across the globe, it lasts for hours. Why? Because is it says so, right here in the script, that's why.

Constellations Are Constant

 * Stargate: The way that constellations are used as a Cartesian coordinate system begins with the idea that a constellation is a fixed point in space. That probably makes it easier to build things you can just walk through to cross interstellar distances.

Supernovae: Causes and Effects
"Gaudior: You know some of the possibilities if your planet is blown up.
 * In A Swiftly Tilting Planet, one of the sequels to A Wrinkle in Time, we learn yet another reason not to throw a nuclear war on Earth:

Charles Wallace: It just might throw off the balance of things, so that the sun would burst into a supernova."

Telescopes 101

 * In the Tomb Raider film, Lara Croft observed the alignment of Pluto and Neptune through a telescope in a room full of what looked like 20 floodlights. Of course, if these two had tried to be too dim to see in that situation, Lara would have just kicked their butts. They must have been really trying to be bright little planetary bodies that night out of sheer terror.