10 Best Space Movies About Eclipses, Comets and Meteors

The best space movies built around a real celestial event are Contact, Deep Impact, Armageddon, Don't Look Up, Melancholia, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Apollo 13, Interstellar, Nope and October Sky. Each one hangs its story on a genuine comet, asteroid, real space mission or the plain night sky, not just generic space opera. Below is the year, director and a link to a reliable film database for each pick, plus a sourced "how real is it" check from the astronomers, NASA scientists and researchers who actually study this stuff.

Movies that get comets and asteroids right (and wrong)

Deep Impact (1998), directed by Mimi Leder, follows a comet on a collision course with Earth. It is the most scientifically careful of the big 1990s disaster movies: CU Boulder planetary scientist Joshua Colwell flew out to Hollywood as a consultant and calculated how large a tsunami a comet impact of a given size and angle would actually generate. The Planetary Society still calls it "a breath of fresh air" next to its rival.

That rival is Armageddon (1998), directed by Michael Bay, in which an asteroid the size of Texas is split by an underground nuclear blast with 18 days' notice. Astronomer Phil Plait has counted the errors, noting the film would need an explosion "the energy of the sun itself" to work and that a bomb powerful enough would be more dangerous than the rock (Live Science). The Planetary Society is blunter: the film's 18-day timeline is "extraordinarily unrealistic," since real planetary defense needs years of advance warning, not weeks (planetary.org). Its director later argued the film's premise, sending a spacecraft to nudge an asteroid off course, predicted NASA's real 2022 DART mission, which slammed a probe into the asteroid moon Dimorphos to test exactly that idea (Yahoo News).

Don't Look Up (2021), directed by Adam McKay, is a satire in which astronomers discover a comet on a direct impact course and can't get anyone to act. Planetary defense astronomer Dr. Amy Mainzer, who co-discovered Comet NEOWISE, consulted on the film and confirms the comet's size (about 9 kilometers wide) really would be "large enough to cause a problem," while stressing that an extinction-level impact of this kind is genuinely rare (Netflix Tudum). It is the strongest entry here for anyone who wants a comet movie about how the science actually gets discovered and reported.

Movies about the night sky, UFOs and first contact

Contact (1997), directed by Robert Zemeckis from Carl Sagan's novel, centers on a radio astronomer who picks up a real signal from the star Vega using a giant radio telescope array. On NPR's Science Movie Club, an NRAO radio astronomer walked through the film scene by scene and found it "got a lot of things right, and a few things wrong" about how SETI and radio astronomy actually work, a rare case of a Hollywood alien movie getting the instruments right even when the ending goes speculative.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), directed by Steven Spielberg, takes its title and its entire classification system from a real astronomer: J. Allen Hynek, the US Air Force's chief scientific consultant on UFO sightings for Project Blue Book, who coined "close encounters of the first, second and third kind" to categorize witness reports and even appears briefly on screen. It remains one of the best movies about aliens precisely because its night sky imagery is built on real 1970s UFO-report language rather than invented sci-fi jargon.

Nope (2022), directed by Jordan Peele, turns a UFO hovering behind clouds into the horror hook, with the sky itself going strange over a family ranch. The saucer creature was not invented from scratch: marine biologist Kelsi Rutledge consulted on its design, basing its cloud camouflage on real cuttlefish pigment cells and its saucer shape on sand dollars, and even wrote it up with a formal (fictional) species name (Science Friday). The eclipse-like moments of the sky darkening are pure filmmaking, not real astronomy, but the creature hiding inside them is grounded in actual animal biology.

Real space missions on screen

Apollo 13 (1995), directed by Ron Howard, dramatizes the real 1970 NASA mission that nearly stranded three astronauts after an oxygen tank exploded en route to the Moon. Real Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell reviewed the sets and said the instrument panels and switches were "exactly what it looks like inside," and the World Science Festival's frame-by-frame review calls it one of the most scientifically faithful NASA movies ever made, flagging only a handful of small errors (the famous line was really "we've had a problem," not "we have a problem"). It is regularly ranked among the greatest sci-fi and space films for exactly this reason: almost none of it is fiction.

Interstellar (2014), directed by Christopher Nolan, is built around a black hole named Gargantua and a wormhole used for interstellar travel. Physicist Kip Thorne, an executive producer and science advisor, didn't just check the script; his visual effects team's black hole rendering method was published as a real peer-reviewed paper in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity, and Thorne said the new imaging technique "will be of great value to astrophysicists" studying real black holes (Space.com). Few black hole movies can claim their special effects work doubled as actual astrophysics research.

When the sky itself becomes the villain

Melancholia (2011), directed by Lars von Trier, imagines a rogue planet drifting past Earth, passing in front of the sun in an eclipse-like transit before a final collision. The real odds are reassuring: astrophysicists put the actual chance of a planetary collision at "zero, for at least the next 10 or 20 million years," rising to roughly 1 percent only five billion years from now as the solar system slowly destabilizes (Slate). The same analysis notes that if such a collision ever did happen, it would unfold catastrophically within a single day, not the slow, dreamlike approach the film shows.

Kid-friendly picks

October Sky (1999), directed by Joe Johnston, is the most kid-friendly entry on this list and the most literally true. It dramatizes real West Virginia teenager Homer Hickam, who watched the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1 cross the night sky over his coal-mining town in October 1957 and was inspired to start building his own rockets (Wikipedia); Hickam went on to a real NASA career training astronauts. Paired with Apollo 13 and the PG-rated Close Encounters, it makes a solid family movie night before a real backyard stargazing session; see our stargazing for beginners guide and kids' space page for how to plan one.

Watch these before our own next eclipse or meteor shower

Melancholia and Nope both use eclipse-style imagery for dramatic effect, but neither shows a real transit. If you want to see one for yourself, the next total solar eclipse to cross the contiguous US is not until August 12, 2045, running from northern California through Texas to Florida with totality lasting over 6 minutes near Camden, Alabama (Wikipedia); see our eclipses hub for the full US and Canada schedule. For something sooner, pair an October Sky rewatch with the Perseids meteor shower, which peaks around August 12 most years and is forecast to be an especially dark, moon-free night in 2028 for prime viewing (American Meteor Society; full moon calendar). Check our events calendar for the full list of upcoming meteor showers, full moons and eclipses.