Wow! The movie had displayed a sky full of stars on a few occassions, and there was no full moon! Finally. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img]

Actually, the star-filled sky was the focus for a couple of scenes. That is, the men in the scene were gazing at the starry sky, and this vision highlighted their conversation. I do not know if the view presented was good or bad astronomy - there were so many stars I could not make out any of the constellations to tell if the sky fit with the season or not. I wonder if at one time people could really see that many stars in teh northern sky - it seems so unbelievable these days.

But if seing the stars wasn't cool enough, one scene had everyone actually gazing up at an aurora! I don't know if that was historically acurate or not, but it sure was pretty. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img]

There was one scene that I was unsure about though: there was a background with a full sky of stars, but the men were too near a light source for this many stars to have been seen with respect to the position of the "viewer," IMO.

Other than that, it was a very long, but very good movie. (Interrestingly, this movie is the prequal to the movie Gettysburg. Go figure.)
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I want to know God's thoughts,..... the rest are details...." - Albert Einstein

(edit to word things better)

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: nebularain on 2003-03-16 00:19 ]</font>

Havn't seen this flick yet....

and this is not bad astronomy....

But many times the makers of historical films (including "Gettysburg") don't take out the airplane contrails from the sky in their shots.

This would almost certainly be an easy thing to do with modern software, and I can think of no excuse for not doing it in a modern high-budget movie. Seeing an airplane contrail behind Lee in his horse or the troops massing for Pickets Charge simply ruins the realism for me.

If I had to write a book about 9-11 I would focus on another date - 9/12. The title would be "The day without contrails". Never did the sky ever look so empty, so threatening and yet so marvelous and open, as on that day.

I was chatting with a flight instructor at the Livermore, CA, airport - and we got onto the subject of airplane noise (I live very near the Concord, CA airport and rather enjoy airplane noise).

Well, he said (as is apparently the case in many airports) that these airports always have 2 or 3 people who account for 90% of the noise complaints.

On September 12 and 13th... they *STILL* got noise complaints. Nevermind there wasn't an airplane in the air over the skies of the Bay Area (save fighter patrols).

IIRC, the aurora over the Fredericksburg battlefield was mention in Ken Burns "The Civil War" miniseries.

I don't know where you live but on 9/11 the sky in my neck of the woods looked like a spilled box of spagetti. All of the jet fighters, bombers and AWACS was an impressive sight. javascript:emoticon('')

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It's just one of those damn things of which there are many few. -- Dan Blocker

lots of planes were landing up here..... eh

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"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."
--Bertrand Russell

I haven't seen this movie. Here is a movie review site a trust though:

www.rottentomatoes.com

It's a great place to look for movies with bad astronomy. Most of the reviewers have some sense anyway. Armegeddon and The Core still rank way to high in my opinion. I can't believe Ghost of Mars scored more than 0%. Anyway, here is the link to the reviews for Gods and Generals:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/Gods...erals-1120554/

As if I needed another reason to think movie critics are idiots.

I saw the movie, and it was nowhere near that bad. In fact, I thought it was pretty good.

Actually, if you read a few of the reviews you can get a good feel for what the movie is like. A lot of movies like Gods and Generals are a matter of personal taste. If I think I might like the movie, I'll read a good review or two and a bad review (depending on how many good reviews there are).

Anyway, as I stated previously it's a pretty good place to find movies that have bad astronomy, or to determine if movies might have any astronomy at all.