In August 2024, astronaut Rod Prazeres received a mysterious message on Instagram that seemed too good to be true – a “small production company” wanted to license his images for use in an undisclosed sci-fi film.
Fun‘ at first – and rightly so – he thought he was being scammed. After all, how many production companies and movie studios approach colleagues by sliding into their DMs and asking for scene footage? A few months and a binding non-disclosure agreement later, her footage would appear on the silver screen as the perfect backdrop for the credits. Ahe Mary projectRyan Gosling-fronted adaptation of Andy Weir’s beloved novel of the same name.
Project Hail Mary debuted to critical acclaim and phenomenal box office returns earlier in March. Even more impressively, it managed to remain captivating and awe-inspiring throughout its 156-minute duration, which compelled us here at Space.com to praise it as such. optimistic outlook on the stars that people need right now. The film also drew a lot real world biologyspace exploration and science, which created a fantastic blockbuster story in reality and the spirit of reality. Prazeres’ astrophysics – and the desire to show real images of deep space over CGI while the rates are high – added to that sense of realism.
“So the first thing I thought was, you know, it’s a scam,” Prazeres told Space.com in an interview. “The second thing, I thought it was, I know it’s a local film, maybe it doesn’t like the local party and all, but let’s look at the guys who look at his details, because he explained the name of the company”. Prazeres went on to create what he jokingly called a “dossier” on the company to see if they were genuine.
Rod Prazeres is an astronomer whose work was shortlisted for the Sir Patrick Moore Award for Best Young Person in the 2024 Royal Observatory Greenwich’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year Award, as well as in the 2026 film “Project Hail Mary”.
A series of conference calls followed, accompanied by the signing of an NDA. For months, Prazeres and the production company discussed using his footage in a sequence earlier in the film, but when the producers’ perspective changed, things began to look uncertain.
“They came back to me and said, ‘Oh, you know, it might not go ahead, but there might be room,'” Prazeres recalled. [work with] some of these tools for something else” Weeks later, the production company destroyed the opportunity to use the Prazeres deep space image to close the blockbuster film.
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The series of events is all the more remarkable because of the short time that Prazeres occupy the night sky. His first celestial astronomical experience came in July 2023 when he captured the view of the Omega Nebula (Messier 17), shining in the constellation of Sagittarius 5,500. bright years to leave The world, according to NASA. In the years that followed Prazeres began his journey of research and learning the craft, which saw him attend many workshops with veteran astronomers. One of the Prazeres nebula Shots were even listed for Best Newcomer Award in the Royal Observatory Greenwich’s 2024 Astrophotographer of the Year competition, eight months into his astronomy training.
Of course, working with Amazon MGM Studios to help model a big blockbuster was on a completely different level than anything that had come before, and all because his photography caught the eye of a production company looking for Google Images for ideas. the neck. “I never in a million years expected that to happen, even if I had 10 years of experience, 20 years of experience, let alone two and a half?”
The images selected for the credit sequence took 396 hours to capture using two telescopes, the William Optics RedCat 51 II and the Askar 130PHQ, along with many special ZWO astronomical cameras, filters and peripherals.
The images include some of the most famous nebulae in the night sky such as Carina NebulaDragons of Ara and unique Vela Supernova Remnanteach one of them was carefully edited to reveal the amazing details of the deep field of view.
However, for all the beauty of the shape of the swirling clouds of dust and gas, one important thing was deliberately left out – none of the images used in the credit sequence of Project Hail Mary contain a single star. The constellations, which are central to the plot of the sci-fi epic, were deliberately removed during editing using special astrophotography software to prevent interference with the foreground subjects.
“It’s easy to do,” explained Prazeres. “You just have to make sure it’s done without, you know, destroying anything in the image and not adding or changing anything from the underlying data”.
Prazeres finally went to see Project Hail Mary a few days before the worldwide release, surrounded by his wife, children and family bound for months not to share his experience of participating in the film with those around him.
“You know, it’s a creative process where the developers could have woken up one day and decided that a black screen was fine and not continue,” Prazeres said. “So that whole situation, all these months of keeping this to myself and working with the studio to make it, was very traumatic. But now it’s here, it’s just, yeah, there’s no way to explain it.”
Inspired to start your astrology journey? Then be sure to check out our roundups of the best lenses and cameras for astronomyas well as ours a beginner’s guide to night sky photography.
Editor’s Note: If you would like to share your astronomy with Space.com readers, please send your photos, comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.
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