from the Conversation
Celestial Navigation was essential for Polynesian voyagers, and the Disney Film Moana does a very good job of depicting legitimate techniques. During the film’s production, Disney created a group of experts on the matter, including Polynesian elders and locals, called the Oceanic Story Trust. Their goal was to advise on cultural accuracy. Thousands of years ago, voyagers would memorize star charts, including rise and set times, in order to determine their locations. They would use their hands to find angles between stars and figure out their latitude specifically. This technique is best used with Polaris, called Hokupa’a in Hawaii. Moana uses her hands for navigation when learning to sail from Maui. In the film, she positions her hand around the constellation Orion, indicating that she’s moving eastward taking time and location into account. Celestial navigation was an incredibly important and necessary part of Polynesian life, and it is fantastic that Disney took steps to ensure accuracy. Has astronomy shown up in other movies you like? Comment below!
The Star Student 
This is so interesting. I had no clue that the Celestial Navigation displayed on screen in Moana was actually accurate. I think it’s awesome that Disney had experts ensuring the cultural accuracy based on ancient Polynesian navigation techniques. The side-by-side pictures of using their hands to determine directionality look very similar. I agree that it’s very cool that Disney decided to include this astronomy reference in Moana. My personal favorite astronomy-related movie is The Martian! I’d love to learn of other movies like Moana that aren’t primarily focused on astronomy but involve astronomy in some way, too.
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This is so fascinating! I really appreciate that Disney had a group of Polynesian elders and locals advising them so as to make the movie and celestial navigation techniques accurate. I love it when production teams pay attention to fine details, and it’s so fun when you can actually understand the minute details of a movie! My personal favorite movie which involves astronomy/space in general is 2001: A Space Odyssey. Although I can’t personally comment on the accuracy of the movie in regards to space travel and whatnot, I did read a quote from 4 NASA engineers which said the movie was very accurate in regards to aerospace engineering! If that’s true, then that just makes the movie even more amazing!
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This is a really cool topic to choose! I enjoyed your blog post. Like Ben, I was surprised about how similar your two pictures are. That shows that the producers of Moana really put some thought into the scientific (and cultural) accuracy of the movie, and specifically this scene! I don’t necessarily have a favorite astronomy movie, but I was watching the Marvel tv show “WandaVision” the other day and there was a reference made to CMBR (cosmic microwave background radiation). While we haven’t (and most likely won’t) learned about CMBR in this class, I learned about it in the last astronomy class I took, and it is always really cool when you see something that you have learned about being used in media, whether to entertain or to explain.
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