The London Daily Telegraph today has a story illustrated by a picture with the following caption: "The "hyperdrive" featured in Star Wars enables Han Solo's Millennium Falcon spaceship to take short cuts between stars through a higher dimension of space." I am sorry to say that I know that of all the space ships in the picture, none of them are the Millennium Falcon.
That said I was shocked, shocked, I tells you, to discover that the stretched stars from many scenes in those films are total fantasy.
Racing through hyperspace at near light speed [past light speed I think, but never mind], the ship's crew sees the stars appear to radiate out from a central point and stretch past them [actually this happens as they enter hyperspace, but, again, never mind]. But in reality, the view through the Millennium Falcon's cockpit window would probably consist of a fuzzy luminous fog surrounding a bright central disc. There would be no sign of stars because the wavelength of their light would be shortened to the invisible X-ray range, say the team of four young scientists from the University of Leicester. … The luminous disc would be due to Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation being shifted into the visible part of the light spectrum. The CMB is radiation left behind by the Big Bang that gave birth to the universe. … One of the students, Riley Connors, 21, from Milton Keynes, said: ''If the Millennium Falcon existed and really could travel that fast, sunglasses would certainly be advisable. On top of this, the ship would need something to protect the crew from harmful X-ray radiation.''
So instead of this
it would be more like the artist's impression here: