Starship Asterisk*

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collinder_135 wrote:

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<<Collinder 135, known sometimes as the Pi Puppis Cluster, is an open cluster in Puppis constellation. It consists of four stars visible also to naked eye, and a widespread population of stars. It lies in the southern celestial hemisphere near a rich star field. The main component is the star Pi Puppis, which gives to the cluster its common name; it is an orange supergiant with a visual magnitude of 2.71. The 5th magnitude stars are all variables: one (NV Puppis) is a Gamma Cassiopeiae variable, and the other (NW Puppis) is a Beta Cephei variable.

The spectrum of Pi Puppis matches a stellar classification of K3 Ib. The Ib luminosity class indicates this a lower luminosity supergiant star that has consumed the hydrogen fuel at its core, evolved away from the main sequence, and expanded to about 290 times the Sun's radius. The effective temperature of the star's outer envelope is about 4,000 K, which gives it the orange hue of a K-type star. It is a semiregular variable star that varies in apparent magnitude from a high of 2.70 down to 2.85.>>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi_Puppids wrote:
<<The Pi Puppids are a meteor shower associated with the comet 26P/Grigg-Skjellerup. The meteor stream was viewable around April 23 [the day in 1616 when both Shakespeare & Cervantes died] but only in years around the parent comet's perihelion date, the last being in 2003. However, as the planet Jupiter has now perturbed the comet's perihelion to beyond Earth's orbit it is uncertain how strong the shower will be, if at all, at the next opportunity in 2008. The Pi Puppids get their name because their radiant appears to lie in the constellation Puppis, at around Right ascension 112 degrees and Declination −45 degrees. This made them only visible to southern observers. They were discovered in 1972 and have been observed about every 5 years - at each perihelion passage of the comet - but often at very low rates per hour.>>

Vasquez Rocks Natural Area Park is a 932-acre park located in the Sierra Pelona Mountains, in northern Los Angeles County, California. It is in Agua Dulce between the Antelope Valley and the Santa Clarita Valley north of Los Angeles

jsanchezjr wrote:I never saw this before. A complete address with the final quote 'planet Earth'. May be we need to included that in our address and possibly another final quote: 'Milky Way galaxy'...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alabama_Hills wrote:

[b][color=#0000FF]This narrow valley doubled as the Khyber Pass in the 1939 epic Gunga Din[/color][/b]

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Click to play embedded YouTube video.

<<Alabama Hills are a "range of hills" and rock formations near the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the Owens Valley, west of Lone Pine in Inyo County, California. The Alabama Hills were named for CSS Alabama. When news of the Confederate warship's exploits reached prospectors in California sympathetic to the American Civil War Confederates, they named many mining claims after the ship, and the name came to be applied to the entire range. When the C.S.S. Alabama was finally sunk off the coast of Normandy by the USS Kearsarge in 1864, prospectors sympathetic to the North named a mining district, a mountain pass, a mountain peak, and a town after the U.S.S. Kearsarge.

Mount Whitney, the tallest mountain in the contiguous United States, towers several thousand feet above this low range, which itself is 1,500 feet above the floor of Owens Valley. However, gravity surveys indicate that the Owens Valley is filled with about 10,000 feet of sediment and that the Alabamas are the tip of a very steep escarpment. This feature may have been created by many earthquakes similar to the 1872 Lone Pine earthquake which, in a single event, caused a vertical displacement of 15–20 feet.

There are two main types of rock exposed at Alabama Hills. One is an orange, drab weathered metamorphosed volcanic rock that is 150-200 million years old. The other type of rock exposed here is 82-85 million year old biotite monzogranite which weathers to potato-shaped large boulders, many of which stand on end due to spheroidal weathering acting on many nearly vertical joints in the rock. Dozens of natural arches are among the main attractions at the Alabama Hills: Mobius Arch, Lathe Arch, the Eye of Alabama and Whitney Portal Arch.

The Alabama Hills are a popular filming location for television and movie productions, especially Westerns set in an archetypical "rugged" environment. Since the early 1920s, 150 movies and about a dozen television shows have been filmed here, including Tom Mix films, Hopalong Cassidy films, The Gene Autry Show, and The Lone Ranger. Classics such as Gunga Din, Springfield Rifle, The Violent Men (1955 film), Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), the Budd Boetticher/Randolph Scott "Ranown" westerns, part of How the West Was Won, and Joe Kidd. In the late 1940s and early 50s the area was also a popular location for the films of B-western actor Tim Holt. The climactic showdown scene in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly was also filmed in The Alabama Hills.

In Gladiator, actor Russell Crowe rides a horse in front of the Alabamas, with Mount Whitney in the background, for a scene presumably set in Spain. Star Trek Generations was filmed here in addition to Overton, Nevada and Paramount Studios. This range was one of the filming locations for Disney's Dinosaur. More recently, many parts of the films Iron Man and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen were filmed here.>>