Where?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-D4qXG8locM

I think you are mistaking zooming for dollying no?

Also no, I do believe fog and haze has been around longer than the Earth, and has been a regular painting technique for many hundreds of years to add depth, particularly to large sceneries and such. I think the haze is clearly visible as a luminous grey colour over the background here:

http://www.theforce.net/swtc/Pix/dvd/ep5/duel4.jpg

And in the same shot, I thought the exhaust vents were those red things also visible, and there's a whole ring of them under the vane in the big overview matte. I thought maybe this ring was what Luke fell into. Or maybe the ones he falls in aren't even visible there.