Yeah, yeah I know; it’s a movie about giant mechanized aliens so it’s not exactly a realistic movie. However, I do expect movies to be at least peripherally aware of the laws of planetary motion.

For those of you that have not seen the trailer for the continuing saga of the autobots anddecepticons – Transformers: Dark of the Moon — the premise is that the Apollo moon landings were undertaken for the secret purpose of exploring an alien crash site. Fair enough, sounds like a reasonable sci-fi story element. But there’s a problem.

Since the astronauts land in the Sea of Tranquility, they are on the side of the Moon that is facing Earth. So, in the movie they have to wait until they rotate around to the dark side of the Moon. Did none of the screenwriters know that the Moon is tidally locked with the Earth, meaning that the same side of the Moon always faces the Earth?

One could argue that those involved with the script may have been aware of this fact, but assumed that most of their viewers wouldn’t know the difference. (Which may be a reasonable argument considering the pervious installment in the series had plot holes large enough to drive a truck through.) Even if this was the case this plot element isn’t necessary to making the story work.

Presumably, the reason the writers did this was to explain why the actions of the astronauts were not being recorded. (Which is even more ridiculous since they are apparently still in communication with Houston during this part — which they wouldn’t have been if they really were on the opposite side of the Moon — making the whole event even more irrelevant and erroneous.) The problem is that nothing the astronauts did on the mission was visible from Earth anyway. They very well could have carried out secret tasks on the surface of the Moon and there is no way for us to know.

The simple reason is that the Moon is simply too far away for us to observe objects that small on the surface. Take the Hubble Space Telescope, one of the worlds most powerful telescopes. It is nearly diffraction limited at an angular resolution of about 0.05 seconds of arc. This means that the telescope can not resolve individual objects smaller than 60 meters (~197 feet) in diameter, and can’t distinguish between objects that are less than about 93 meters apart (just shy of the length of a football field).

So it is unnecessary to devise a way in which the astronauts could escape the watchful eye of the rest of the world. We only saw what NASA wanted us to see in the first place. All they would have to do is shut off the feed from the cameras on the surface and we would be blind to what they were doing. The only other way that images of the action could have been captured was if an orbiting lunar probe passed overhead. But presumably said probe would have also seen the downed spacecraft, so it would have been a moot point.

The point being that the incorrect use of the movements of our Moon is unnecessary to the story line. It would be nice if they could at least get some basic astronomy right. Then again, it is a Michael Bay movie so there should still be lots of action and explosions to keep things interesting.