Explanation: Only two days past full, February's moon shines through thin clouds, rising on the left in this fisheye night skyscape. The moonlight illuminates a weathered, rounded foreground in the Alabama Hills, conveniently located east of Mt. Whitney along the Sierra Nevada range in California, USA, planet Earth. Orion the Hunter stands at the right, a familiar northern winter constellation. Bright Jupiter, the solar system's ruling gas giant, is near center at the top of the frame. Below Jupiter, Sirius, alpha star of the Big Dog, poses above a bowed and twisted landform known as Möbius Arch, its curve reminiscent of the mathematically famous surface with only one side. Of course, instead of using rock, wind, and weather, a Möbius strip is easier to make with paper, scissors, and tape.
What a lovely picture! The sky looks so lightweight and vast, and the stars could be thought of as birds which take endless flight in that blue vastness. And the rocky formations below are so, so... well, earthbound, perhaps? They are massive too, and ponderous. That amazing formation seen directly below Sirius looks like an elephant turned to stone.
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'...
<<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.>>
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'...
You skipped a few addresses, most notably the star system. For the moment and foreseeable future the address is fully qualified. That is, until the day when Dear Reader could become confused as to which star system is in reference.For now such perspectives are limited to a single star system. It is exciting to note that at this time a similar perspective could be presented and the final address be Mars.
Certainty is an emotion. So follow your spindle neurons.
This picture made me smile! It's a reminder to me that you don't need perfectly clear weather, or a very dark sky, to enjoy skywatching. I'm fascinated by the Moon through clouds. Everything looks different from one moment to the next: the Moon's appearance, the thinner clouds shining and the thicker clouds obscuring the moonlight, the varying brightness of the moonlight on the ground. You often see moonbows and other refractions of moonlight through the clouds. And each moment is unique, never to recur.
The Kirk - Gorn battle scene was filmed at Vasquez Rocks
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
Looks like the site has 15 or 16 film/TV credits including 3 separate StarTrek episodes representing 3 different planets
<<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.>>
Mobius Arch Moonrise
It's a reminder to me that you don't need perfectly clear weather, or a very dark sky, to enjoy skywatching. I'm fascinated by the Moon through clouds. Everything looks different from one moment to the next: the Moon's appearance, the thinner clouds shining and the thicker clouds obscuring the moonlight, the varying brightness of the moonlight on the ground. You often see moonbows and other refractions of moonlight through the clouds. And each moment is unique, never to recur.
