Mount Rushmore's Starry Night (04 July 2009)

[apodman]

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap090704.html

The historic site features enormous sculptures of four US presidents; George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, carved into the southeast face of granite cliffs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidents_Race

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1054: A supernova noted by Chinese observers heralds the creation of the Crab Nebula. The exact date has been disputed, but most accounts accept the Chinese date of July 4.

The Biggest July 4 Fireworks Explosion in History Formed M1 ... According to Chinese records, on July 4, 1054 AD a very bright guest star appeared, at the current position of the Crab Nebula. It was close to the star, Zeta Tauri. At its peak this guest star was visible in the daytime for a period of 23 days. It slowly faded and disappeared from view altogether in the spring of 1056, nearly two years later.

So is that the Chinese calendar converted to Julian or the Chinese calendar converted to Gregorian?

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Most noticeable are the stars of Ursa Major and the asterism known as the Big Dipper, almost resting upright along the cliff edge near picture center.

Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night Over the Rhone, painted in September 1888 at Arles, depicts the Rhône River at night.

This painting is a view to the south, where Vincent took the liberty to place the Big Dipper there in the sky, where he could never have seen it like that, as Ursa Major is roughly towards the north.

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a line extending through the dipper's two [rightmost] stars points to the upper right toward Polaris

They don't point as close to Polaris in this flat picture as they do in the round sky.

[neufer]

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap090704.html

The historic site features enormous sculptures of four US presidents; George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, carved into the southeast face of granite cliffs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidents_Race

Is that a Big Pitcher between them

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_by_Northwest

<<North by Northwest is a 1959 American suspense film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint and James Mason, and featuring Leo G. Carroll and Martin Landau. The screenplay was written by Ernest Lehman, who wanted to write "the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures". Hitchcock often told journalists of an idea he had about Cary Grant hiding out from the villains inside Abraham Lincoln's nose and being given away when he sneezes. He speculated that the film could be called "The Man in Lincoln's Nose" (Lehman's [own] version is that it was "The Man on Lincoln's Nose") or even "The Man who Sneezed in Lincoln's Nose", though he probably felt the latter was insulting to his adopted America.

At Hitchcock's insistence, the film was made in Paramount's VistaVision widescreen process, making it one of the few VistaVision films made at MGM.>>

a line extending through the dipper's two [rightmost] stars points to the upper right toward Polaris

They don't point as close to Polaris in this flat picture as they do in the round sky.

The distortion is probably due to a very wide-angle lens.

[apodman]

My Fellow Americans (1996)

Tourist: We're going to Mount Rushmore! One of America's greatest natural wonders!

Ex-president: It wasn't natural. It was carved.

Tourist: Somebody carved it? Well, that just ruins the whole thing!

Gutzon Borglum

[Case]

This APOD is a cut-out from a larger wide angle panorama. Pretty cool, as it features the Milky Way band too.

[neufer]

a line extending through the dipper's two [rightmost] stars points to the upper right toward Polaris

They don't point as close to Polaris in this flat picture as they do in the round sky.

The distortion is probably due to a very wide-angle lens.

This APOD is a cut-out from a larger wide angle panorama. Pretty cool, as it features the Milky Way band too.

<<At Hitchcock's insistence, [North by Northwest] was made in Paramount's VistaVision widescreen process,
making it one of the few VistaVision films made at MGM.>>

<<As a response to an industry recession brought about by the popularity of television], the various Hollywood studios turned to large format movies in order to regain audience attendance. VistaVision is a higher resolution, widescreen variant of the 35 mm motion picture film format which was created engineers at Paramount Pictures in 1954. VistaVision was sometimes called Lazy 8 by film professionals because of its horizontal orientation on the negative. This gave a wider aspect ratio of 1.5:1 versus the conventional 1.37:1 Academy ratio, and a much larger image area. Alfred Hitchcock used VistaVision for many of his films in the 1950s. However, by the late 1950s with the introduction of finer-grained color stocks and the disadvantage of shooting twice as much negative stock, VistaVision became obsolete. Less expensive anamorphic systems such as Panavision and the 70 mm format became standard during the late 1950s and 1960s.>>

[Loco]

Isn't there a crazy drug named Rush? Isn't Rushmore a huge advertisement by the Mafia?

[iamlucky13]

Wow...another classic shot of stars and ground together by Mr. Pacholka.

If you do a search on his name, you'll see he's had quite a few shots reflecting a similar idea featured on APOD over the last decade or so.