Thread by @pabl0hidalgo

A few weeks ago, someone @'ed me and Matt asking about that celestial object seen out of the medical frigate window at the end of The Empire Strikes Back. It's been the subject of speculation and changing definitions over the years. A thread...

The current consensus is that it's a protostar, which Matt answered. That works. But don't think you're alone if you thought it was *the* galaxy. There were a few sources suggesting that.

So what was the intent? The original shooting script calls it a "large red star... with one small planet." The conformed published script (found in THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK NOTEBOOK, 1980) says "a dense, luminous galaxy." (As an aside, I dislike conformed scripts).

The novelization, released April 12, 1980, well over a month before the film, went with the shooting script version, calling it “a large red star.”

ILM called it a nebula. Or, did so when supplying interviews and information with CINEFEX #2 (1980). "Joe Johnston prepares a model nebula for photography. The swirling star formation was filmed with a slight rotation and incorporated into the final sequence."

Here's Joe Johnston and Dennis Muren setting it up. It's baking soda and glass beads on a tabletop covered with black velvet.

Model maker Lorne Peterson called it “The Empire Nebula” in SCULPTING A GALAXY, a book we worked on that came out in 2006.

Proponents of the protostar definition point to this nebula history as reason to back their take. Also -- not that science ever really enters into SW all that much -- they may say that it's spinning way too fast to be a galaxy. I have no particular space dog in this space fight.

It rarely comes up in storytelling, since it's quite literally cosmic windowdressing. But I remember Tales of the Bounty Hunters (1996) having 4-LOM and Zuckuss meet up with the Rebel fleet "out of the galaxy at a point near the galactic equatorial plane," favoring the galaxy POV

Here's an early attempt to make a nebula outside the window. This design wasn't to be.

Some of you may have The Empire Strikes Back Storybook (1980) from Random House/Scholastic, with this memorable image of a red nebula out the window.

This composite image made it into the Empire Strikes Back photo keyset, which means it appeared in many places. Trading cards, magazines, etc.

This is just conjecture / head canon or whatever, but I'm convinced that red nebula artwork is what Archie Goodwin had in mind when he wrote The Crimson Forever for Star Wars #50 back in the day. It's a gas cloud at the very edge of the galaxy.

That red nebula art is in the Lucasfilm image archives and has shown up as graphical elements over the years, like these great title pages in 1997's Star Wars Chronicles.

The most striking use, imho, is in the 1987 Star Warriors tabletop starship combat game, where it's the background of the enormous hexmap.

The color is just cosmetic - it has no bearing in the game, unless you use it when playing the module RIDERS OF THE MAELSTROM (1990), which takes place within a red nebula called the Maelstrom, and the nebula art actually has a gameplay effect. Fun stuff.

Anyway, that's just an info dump of history and past definitions. A split-the-difference definition is that it's a protostar far outside the galaxy. This is one of those things that since it has very little tangible effect on the story, let it be whatever you want.