Streaming Stars

Man, hyperspace always looks so freaky.

"The stars are going the wrong way."

— Hoshi Sato, Star Trek: Enterprise

Real spaceships transiting the void would move at incomprehensible speeds, however, you wouldn't know that by looking out the window. In media, this is unacceptable. A moving object must give the impression of speed and motion.

Enter the streaming star field. Look out the window or canopy of any TV or movie spaceship and you'll see a background of stars flowing past like telephone poles. This happens whether the spaceship is moving at sub- or super-luminal speeds (though super-luminal velocities will have some additional effects).

As Douglas Adams pointed out, space is big. This means that stars are really far away. Galaxies are even farther out. There will be very little Motion Parallax in a star field seen from a spaceship moving through the solar system or even between nearby stars. In captain dummy talk, that means you simply won't see a star move in relation to you, unless you're a) within said star's solar system (and then it'll just be the one), b) moving really, really fast, like cross-the-galaxy-in-a-day fast, or c) turning. Anyone who's driven down a long highway in a wide flat area can see this effect to a lesser extent: that mountain far to your left doesn't really seem to move much as you go. Our sun, and even just the Moon, which is much closer, give an even better example; they don't seem to move at all as you move.

In fact, even if you flew so fast that you could see star movement (but still sub-luminal), the actual view would surprise you: the stars before you would brighten and concentrate in the center of the field of view, while the ones behind you would dim and diverge all over the field of view.^note While light from the stars ahead of you would indeed blue-shift, this effect would apply to the entire EM spectrum, so that IR wavelengths would be shifted into the visible spectrum. Likewise, the red-shift of stars behind you would shift UV wavelengths into the visible spectrum. In either case, the perceived colors of stars would change very little. If you accelerate to this speed quickly (without dying from the huge amounts of acceleration required), the end result would give the impression that you are moving backwards.

Of course, from a production standpoint, even if you averted this trope, you could theoretically still convey motion with the starship moving across the screen, though probably not in a way that says "warp speed". Video games often get around this by having particles of space dust that will naturally fly past the camera to convey movement, but of course, this can't apply to FTL speeds either.

Compare and contrast Heavenly Concentric Circles, when heaven (and, sometimes, space) imagery is riddled with concentric patterns.

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Examples:

Fan Works

• Rocketship Voyager. Captain Janeway has a This Cannot Be! reaction to seeing this for the first time, as none of them have ever traveled faster than light before.
  The cold pinpoints of distant stars had blurred into incandescent blue lines streaking across the telescreens, while the rearward-pointing electroscopes showed those same lines shifting to a crimson red before vanishing into a blackness darker than the far reaches of the void.
  'We're moving so fast that light-waves can't catch up,' thought Janeway, stunned at the implications. 'That's impossible... WE'VE CROSSED THE THRESHOLD OF LIGHT SPEED!'

Films — Live-Action

• Played with in Star Wars. It uses the effect, but in fact it's only the reality warp of going into hyperspace. Once you're in hyperspace all you can see out the windows is a crazy blue energy tunnel that gives people migraines if they stare at it too long.
• Both used and spoofed in Spaceballs. To catch up with a fleeing Lone Starr after he goes "light speed" (invoking Streaming Stars), the villains' spaceship shifts to "Ludicrous Speed"; this produces a plaid pattern. (That's pretty ludicrous all right...)
• While not technically a streaming starfield, the Stargate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey deserves special mention. The starfield in the exteriors also move because it just didn't look good if it didn't, Kubrick tried it the right way but went with wrong because it made for a better looking shot.
• In Airplane!, the stewardess gets high while watching this trope, perhaps a dig on how people allegedly got high on drugs before watching the Stargate sequence in 2001.
• For that matter, the Stargate sequence from Stargate applies too.
  • However on a much smaller scale than most insulters - they are traveling at least ten lightyears in just a few seconds, so the speed is REALLY big. You can also always say that the wormhole actually travels through entirely different universe/dimension/portions of space etc., but that'd be just mean.
  • In both the film and the series, the stargate sequence is only there for the benefit of the audience and is mostly absent from later episodes (unless it's plot-relevant). The people traveling through the wormhole are dematerialized at this point and don't really exist as physical objects.
• Alien. Originally the red-blue shift was to be used when the Nostromo was moving past light speed, but this was one case where dull realism was deemed more appropriate to the movie's dark tone.
• The Soviet two-part film Moscow — Cassiopeia shows blue streaming stars moving past the ship when viewed from the outside, despite the ship moving at near-light speeds (about 0.93c).
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek (2009) uses this trope in a similar way that Star Wars does, to represent the reality-bending acceleration into warp. Like Star Wars, a ship's view during warp travel is a chaotic opaque vortex, a departure from the traditional aesthetic.
  • Star Trek Beyond adds some cool gravitational lensing to the streaming stars.
• In Ernest Saves Christmas, Santa's sleigh has a "Priority Delivery" mode that makes it accelerate with Star Wars-style warp effects.

Literature

• In the Discworld universe, the stars are actually balls of fire about a mile wide, so this happens gradually as A'Tuin swims through space, and the constellations change regularly. It would actually be possible for a time traveler to identify the era by what stars are visible.
• Averted in Only You Can Save Mankind, the first book of the Johnny Maxwell Trilogy, also by Terry Pratchett, where Wobbler creates a video game "Journey to Alpha Centauri". Apparently if you leave it running for several hundred years a message appears saying "Welcome to Alpha Centauri. Now go home," but the view doesn't noticeably change at any point along the way. (It changes. It just does it in real time.)
• Justified in The House on the Borderland, where the narrator sees stars wheeling overhead so fast that they appear as bright streaks circling the planet. As he's traveling forward in time at incredible speed, on his way to the end of the solar system, that's just how the Earth's own rotation would make the night skies look.
• Averted in the Heechee Saga, where the ships are described as catching up to light emitted from behind them and eventually just seeing a mottled sploch on the front viewscreen from all the old light.
• In Alastair Reynolds' House of Suns, Purslane's ship features a dining room that displays this image in its windows, purely because Purslane likes the effect.
• Isaac Asimov's Nemesis: Because FTL travel is based on jumps through space, seeing the stars move is the first sign that something's wrong — it was a short test jump, stars weren't supposed to move perceptibly. The ship had rotated while in hyperspace, causing the perspective to shift.
• The realistic version caused by moving at high sublight speeds appears in Frederik Pohl's novel The World at the End of Time, continuing up to the point that the light of the Universe is concentrated on what looks like a very bright star.

Live-Action TV

• Star Trek: When the series came back from the dead in the late 1970s, an attempt was made at a more accurate depiction of space, but everyone agreed it didn't look right for Star Trek, so they went back to the original style.
  • The episode "The Galileo Seven" even shows Streaming Stars rushing past the Enterprise when it's in orbit around a planet.
  • In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the effect for stars at warp speed is upgraded to short, rainbow-colored streaks. According to some sources, those streaks shown out the window while at warp aren't stars, they're nearby pieces of space debris or gas lit up by the passing warp bubble — since even at warp nine (~1000 c), distant stars shouldn't be seen moving anywhere near that quickly. The 'debris' theory would explain why the "stars" are tiny dots even when shown to clearly be right next to the ship. (Turning at warp is a Bad Thing that gets a stern warning from your engineer, but it is done at times, and evidently, stars are about the size of baseballs as the ship moves around and through 'em. It must be seen to be believed.)
  • In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, a moving starfield view is justifiable, as the eponymous space station rotates... but the same windows change between panning and non-panning views in various episodes!
  • Star Trek: Enterprise. Hoshi complains that the stars are going past her window the wrong way. Rather than lampshading the technical inaccuracies of this trope, it turns out she just hasn't got her space-legs yet. However due to a continuity error, the stars end up moving the wrong way past the Captain's mess, as if the room has somehow shifted from the bow of Enterprise to the starboard side.
  • Star Trek: Discovery combines the traditional streaming stars effect with the aforementioned gravitational lensing from Star Trek Beyond and shows what it would look like from the POV of someone on a starship at warp.
• Averted in Red Dwarf. The book even notes that Lister finds the view awe-inspiring at first, and later deeply boring. Reverted in the "Remastered" TV episodes, where the static view out of Lister's porthole was altered to make the stars move. Pretty much sums up the remastered episodes really...

Radio

• In the first BBC Radio Serial in the Journey into Space trilogy, Operation Luna, they encounter UFOs during their return from the moon and black out; when they wake up and turn the cameras on to look outside, the stars are streaking past them. In a subversion, it turns out that this is because the ship is tumbling; even though the ship has been accelerated to time-bending speeds once they get the tumble under control, the observed motion is next to nil.

Video Games

• Black Prophecy uses black chunks of space debris and a set of Speed Stripes encircling the center of the screen.
• A truly bizarre incarnation of this trope appears in Diablo II: the starry background of the Arcane Sanctuary area is always moving while the character is standing still, the stars streaming towards the right. The stars move much more quickly towards the right when the character runs to the left, perhaps to strengthen the sense of movement in that direction. It sort of breaks down, however, when running in the opposite direction because the stars still accelerate towards the right.
• Elite II: Frontier and its sequel First Encounters, also both using a Newtonian flight model, have "stellar particles" which can be turned off, which is highly recommended for manual maneuvering.
• Freelancer does that with tiny little particles that only show up when the viewpoint is moving. According to the manual, they're added by your ship's computer to make it easier for pilots to judge their speed at a glance. You can turn them off in the menu.
• I-War with its Newtonian flight model does this with explicitly computer-generated reference points to help with maneuvers.
• Mass Effect shows this realistically:
  • In Mass Effect, whenever the Normandy moves from system to system, the loading screens show the light "approaching" (read: entering the mass effect envelope and moving faster) the Normandy as blue-shifted, while the light "trailing" (read: exiting the mass effect envelope) the Normandy as red-shifted.
  • In Mass Effect 2, while the Normandy is moving between systems, Shepard can walk around inside the ship and look out the windows in the observation decks or bridge, and the stars are shown barely moving at all, with blue-shifted light passing the vessel.
  • Mass Effect 3 has a Loading Screen of the FTL-traveling Normandy SR-2 seemingly not moving against the background of the stars for the same reason.
• A regular background effect in Star Raiders, particularly when traveling through hyperspace.
• Played With in Terminus, in which lines fly by your cockpit while in motion, colored blue in front and red in back, getting longer the faster you are moving, simulating the kind of expected effect. However, the tutorial makes explicit that these "velocity lines" are actually projections on the ship's Heads-Up Display, as they are useful for letting the pilot quickly and easily gauge their speed and direction at a glance no matter where they are looking. Since landmarks can literally be astronomical distances from one another, a human frame of reference grasps a sense of motion better when they see something flashing by.
• The Wing Commander series used tiny particles to show speed, too.

Western Animation

• Another Star Trek send-up, the Australian Sev Trek: Pus in Boots, explained that the streaming stars were actually the screensaver on the bridge viewscreen.
• A bizarre example takes place in Avatar: The Last Airbender when Aang is trying to "let the cosmic energy flow" through him as stars spin by. The starfield returns to normal as he lets go of transient attachments and accepts the reality of the Avatar Spirit... or at least that's what the Guru is trying to impress upon him.
• Averted most of the time in 3-2-1 Penguins! Played straight however in "The Doom Funnel Rescue" when B.I.N.G. presses a button that cause the Rockhopper to travel at a speed of Warp 10.

Other

• In a webcomic review for Sluggy Freelance of all places it's used as a backdrop for part of the video. Here's the link.
• Nature can easily replicate this at slower speeds in Real Life. If you drive in the middle of heavy snowfall at night, and if your windshield is clear enough, then the snow will appear to replicate this effect (albeit with a bit of a curve to it) as the snowflakes are reflected by your vehicle's headlights, especially when high beams are on. That being said, you should obviously keep your eyes on the road and not the snow unless you want to get in an accident in the process. Save it for when you're a passenger.

Real Life

• The star trail is a phenomenon that occurs when a camera is left capturing an image of the sky for large exposure times at night. It's actually due to Earth's rotation and appears in a Heavenly Concentric Circles pattern but it sure looks a lot like the common depictions of this trope.

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