James Cameron’s Titanic features its fair share of unforgettable moments, but none were more memorable for Neil deGrasse Tyson than the scene toward the end of the movie in which Rose (Kate Winslet) is shown staring up at the stars while floating on a piece of wood.
“We know everything about the night sky when the ship sank,” Tyson explained during a 2020 appearance on the StarTalk podcast, “and [Rose] looks up and it’s her point of view and it’s the wrong sky. I noticed this immediately.”
As Tyson tells it, the sky created for the 1997 film is what’s known as a “lazy sky.” The reason for this, he reveals, is that whoever was responsible for generating the stars only did so for half of the sky and then used a mirror image of those same stars to fill out the other side. Had it been a different movie, Tyson says the error wouldn’t have bothered him as much. However, because the marketing for Titanic played up how accurate everything was supposed to be, he couldn’t help but take issue.
The ‘Titanic’ Error Neil deGrasse Tyson Noticed Immediately
Tyson fired off a letter to Cameron at the time, breaking down how he’d messed up the stars, but never received a reply. Years later, Tyson ran into Cameron at an event, and after reminding the director of the mistake, he was told that the stars were created in post-production.
When Tyson brought the subject up again later on, Cameron sarcastically responded by saying, “Last I checked, Titanic has grossed a billion dollars worldwide. Imagine how much more it would’ve grossed had I gotten the sky correct.”
Ordinarily, that’d be where a story like this ends, but a couple of weeks later, Tyson got a call from somebody associated with Cameron. To his surprise, Cameron and his team were working on a centennial director’s cut of Titanic and were looking for a little assistance with their celestial problem. Tyson took on the task and put together a revised set of stars for the special edition.
That version now accurately reflects what passengers on the RMS Titanic would’ve seen in the sky on the morning of April 15, 1912.
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