In August 2024, astrophotographer Rod Prazeres received a strange Instagram message that seemed a little too good to be true — a "small production company" wanted to license his images for use in an undisclosed sci-fi movie.
Prazeres' initially — and reasonably — assumed that he was being scammed. After all, how many production companies and movie studios approach collaborators by sliding into their DMs and asking for space pics? Several months and a binding non-disclosure agreement later, his images would appear on the silver screen as a magnificent backdrop for the credits of Project Hail Mary, the Ryan Gosling-fronted adaptation of Andy Weir's beloved novel of the same name.
Project Hail Mary launched to both critical acclaim and impressive box office earnings earlier in March. More impressively, it managed to maintain a sense of charm and wonder at the cosmos throughout its 156-minute runtime that compelled us here at Space.com to praise it as the optimistic look towards the stars that humanity needs right now. The film also drew heavily from real-world biology, space exploration and science, which grounded the blockbuster's fantastic story in reality and an air of authenticity. Prazeres' astrophotography — and the drive to showcase real deep space images over CGI as the credits rolled — added to that sense of authenticity.
"So the first thing I thought was, you know, it's a scam," Prazeres told Space.com in an interview. "Second thing, I thought it was, I know it's a local film, maybe not like a local festival and all, but let's look up the guys who look at his details, because he specified the name of the company". Prazeres went on to create what he jokingly called a "dossier" on the company to determine if they were genuine.
Rod Prazeres is an astrophotographer whose work was shortlisted for Sir Patrick Moore prize for Best Newcomer in the 2024 Royal Observatory Greenwich's Astronomy Photographer of the Year Award, as well as in the 2026 blockbuster movie 'Project Hail Mary'.
Next followed a series of conference calls, accompanied by the signing of an NDA. For months, Prazeres and the production company discussed using his images for a sequence earlier in the movie, but as the producers' creative vision shifted, things began to look uncertain.
"They got back to me and said, oh, you know, it may not be going ahead," recalled Prazeres, "but there may be a place to [work with] some of these materials for something else" Weeks later, the production company broached the possibility of using Prazeres' deep space imagery to close out the blockbuster movie.
The chain of events is all the more noteworthy given the relatively brief time that Prazeres has been capturing the night sky. His first experience of deep sky astrophotography came in July 2023 when he captured a view of the Omega Nebula (Messier 17), which glows in the constellation Sagittarius 5,500 light-years from Earth, according to NASA. The years that followed saw Prazeres embark on a personal journey to research and learn the craft, which saw him attend multiple workshops with veteran astrophotographers. One of Prazeres' nebula shots was even shortlisted for the Best Newcomer award in the Royal Observatory Greenwich's 2024 Astrophotographer of the Year competition, eight months into his astro training.
Of course, working with Amazon MGM Studios to help illustrate a major blockbuster was on an entirely different level from anything that had come before, and all because his photography had drawn the eyes of a production company searching Google Images for views of the Milky Way. "Never in a million years would I have expected that to happen, even if I had 10 years experience, 20 experience, let alone two and a half?"
The images selected for the credit sequence took a cumulative 396 hours to capture using two telescopes, a William Optics RedCat 51 II and a Askar 130PHQ, in conjunction with a host of specialized ZWO astronomy cameras, filters and peripherals.
The images include some of the most famous nebulas in the night sky such as the Carina Nebula, the Fighting Dragons of Ara and the distinctive Vela Supernova Remnant, each of which was painstakingly edited to bring out spectacular detail in the deep space vistas.
However, for all the structural beauty of the swirling clouds of dust and gas, one key element was intentionally omitted — none of the images used in Project Hail Mary's credit sequence contained a single star. The stellar bodies, which are central to the plot of the sci-fi epic, were intentionally removed during the editing stage using special astrophotography software to prevent them from interfering with the foreground subtitles.
"It's relatively simple to do it," explained Prazeres. "You've just got to make sure it's done without, you know, damaging anything in the image and not adding or altering anything from the underlying data".
Prazeres finally went to see Project Hail Mary a few days ahead of the worldwide release, surrounded by his wife, children and extended family having been bound for months not to share his experience of contributing to the movie with those around him.
"You know, it is a creative process that the producers could have just woken up one day and decided black screen on credits is perfectly fine and not move on," reasoned Prazeres. "So that whole situation, all these months of keeping this to myself and working with the studio to get it going, it was very nerve wracking. But now that it's out there, I'm just, yeah, there's no feeling to describe it."
Inspired to begin your own astrophotography journey? Then be sure to check out our roundups of the best lenses and cameras for astrophotography, along with our beginner's guide to photographing the night sky.
Editor's Note: If you would like to share your astrophotography with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.
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