Look out into the universe and you’ll recognise some of its members have played a part in the works of science fiction

Written by Stuart Atkinson 

© Getty

It’s no surprise that many of today’s astronomers are also fans of science fiction. Indeed, it’s how many of us became interested in ‘space’ in the first place. As children we watched Captain Kirk whizzing from planet to planet on Star Trek; hid behind sofas watching the Doctor battling the Daleks; visited the cinema to watch the Star Wars films, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and read science-fiction novels by Stephen Baxter, Kim Stanley Robinson and others.

It’s true that, for many people, the imaginary sciencefiction worlds visited by the USS Enterprise and the TARDIS are as fascinating, beautiful and real as anywhere visited by Viking, Voyager and Cassini. And on a clear night it’s possible to visit many of these imaginary places with a telescope. Although the planets themselves are made up and don’t actually exist, we can look up into the night sky and see the stars they were placed in orbit around by screenwriters, directors and authors over the years.

THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION

Some time in the next couple of years, film star Tom Cruise will fly up to the International Space Station (ISS) to shoot sequences there. But the ISS has already featured in many science-fiction films, including Gravity, where disaster-prone astronaut Sandra Bullock borrows a Russian Soyuz capsule; Life, where an alien life form from Mars goes on a killing spree, and The Day After Tomorrow, where astronauts look down helplessly at Earth as it freezes beneath them. But Cruise won’t be the first actor to go to the ISS. In October 2021 Russian actress Yulia Peresild spent 12 days up there filming zero-gravity sequences for the film The Challenge. From Earth the ISS looks like a bright ‘star’ that crosses the sky from west to east. If you want to see it in the sky this month you can use various websites and apps to calculate if and when it will be visible from your location.