The latest in the James Bond series of movies takes a turn toward the astronomical in its choice of locations — the Residencia for astronomers and staff at European Southern Observatory and its Paranal site in the Atacama Desert of Chile. I wrote about this on March 25, 2008, when ESO first mentioned that the moviemakers had spent time doing location shooting for Quantum of Solace at the observatory.
I’ve never been to Paranal, but from my experience at other high desert locations, I would imagine that this was quite an undertaking to shoot at high altitude (Paranal is at 2600 meters — about 8,500 feet) at a working observatory, where work doesn’t stop when the clapper board descends. In addition, the environment around Paranal is quite delicate, and the film crews had to be careful for both themselves and the ecosystem.
The movie opens in theaters in the UK on Hallowe’en and the following week around the world. There’s a podcast at the observatory’s website as well as more information about the shooting and how the Paranal site came to be chosen by the filmmakers. While you’re there, you can explore some of the cosmic wonders that are being observed at Paranal, too!
Filming the new Bond movie at Cerro Paranal, Chile.
The image below is just breathtaking. I found it at the Astronomy Picture of the Day site and just gaped at it for a few moments. Pictures like this are what draws us all to astronomy — if for nothing else than the sheer loveliness of such distant, alien visions. This was actually released a couple of years ago as a part of a story about looking for what we thought might have been the heaviest (most massive) star in the Milky Way Galaxy. When astronomers first studied this region, they speculated that there was a single star here that could be as much as 200 solar masses, which would make it the most massive known.
It turns out that what they thought was a single massive star was, in fact, three stars with about 100 solar masses divided between them. If you’re interested, they’re the central bright stars above the cloud in this image. Even three stars having a hundred solar masses is … well… massive. These stars will become insanely bright and stupendous supernovae when they die. And, below them is a huge stellar nursery, cranking out more hot, young stars for future astronomers to study!
