Starship Asterisk*

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Shasta wrote:
<<Mount Shasta (Úytaahkoo in Karuk or "White Mountain") is located in Siskiyou County and at 14,179 feet (4,322 m) is the second highest peak in the Cascades and the fifth highest in California. Mount Shasta has an estimated volume of 85 cubic miles (350 km3) which makes it the most voluminous stratovolcano in the Cascade Volcanic Arc. Mount Shasta is not connected to any nearby mountain. It rises abruptly and stands nearly 10,000 feet (3,000 m) above the surrounding terrain. Because of this great prominence, it casts a gigantic shadow at sunrise.

The mountain has attracted the attention of poets, authors, and presidents. Shasta was memorably described by the poet Joaquin Miller: "Lonely as God, and white as a winter moon, Mount Shasta starts up sudden and solitary from the heart of the great black forests of Northern California."

Naturalist and author John Muir said of Shasta: "When I first caught sight of it over the braided folds of the Sacramento Valley, I was fifty miles away and afoot, alone and weary. Yet all my blood turned to wine, and I have not been weary since."

The mountain consists of four overlapping volcanic cones which have built a complex shape, including the main summit and the prominent satellite cone of 12,330-foot (3,760 m) Shastina, which has a visibly conical form. If Shastina were a separate mountain, it would rank as the third-highest peak of the Cascade Range.

Mount Shasta's surface is relatively free of deep glacial erosion except, paradoxically, for its south side where Sargents Ridge runs parallel to the U-shaped Avalanche Gulch. This is the largest glacial valley on the volcano, although it does not presently have a glacier in it.

There are seven named glaciers on Shasta, with the four largest (Whitney, Bolam, Hotlum, and Wintun) radiating down from high on the main summit cone to below 10,000 feet (3,000 m) primarily on the north and east sides. The Whitney Glacier is the longest and the Hotlum is the most voluminous glacier in the state of California. Three of the smaller named glaciers occupy cirques near and above 11,000 feet (3,400 m) on the south and southeast sides, including the Watkins, Konwakiton, and Mud Creek Glaciers.

There are many buried glacial scars on the mountain which were originally created in recent glacial periods ("ice ages") of the present Wisconsinian glaciation. Most have since been filled-in with andesite lava, pyroclastic flows, and talus from lava domes. Shastina, by comparison, has a fully intact summit crater indicating that Shastina developed after the last ice age.

About 593,000 years ago andesitic lavas erupted in what is now Mount Shasta's western flank near McBride Spring. Over time an ancestral Shasta stratovolcano was built to large but unknown height; sometime between 300,000 to 360,000 years ago the entire north side of the volcano collapsed, creating an enormous landslide or debris avalanche, 6.5 cubic miles (27 km3) in volume. The slide flowed northwestward into Shasta Valley where the Shasta River now cuts through the 28 miles (45 km) long flow.

What remains of the oldest of Shasta's four cones is exposed at Sargents Ridge on the south side of the mountain. Lavas from the Sargents Ridge vent cover the Everitt Hill shield at Shasta's southern foot. The last lavas to erupt from the vent were hornblende-pyroxene andesites with a hornblende dacite dome at its summit. Glacial erosion has since modified its shape.

Since then the Shastina cone has been built by mostly pyroxene andesite lava flows. Some 9,500 years ago, these flows reached about 6.8 miles (10.9 km) south and 3 miles (4.8 km) north of the area now occupied by nearby Black Butte (see image at right). The last eruptions formed Shastina's present summit about a hundred years later. But before that, Shastina, along with the then forming Black Butte dacite plug dome complex to the west, created numerous pyroclastic flows that covered 43 square miles (110 km2), including large parts of what is now Mount Shasta, California and Weed, California. Diller Canyon (400 feet (120 m) deep and 0.25 miles (400 m) wide) is an avalanche chute that was probably carved into Shastina's western face by these flows.

The last to form, and the highest cone, the Hotlum Cone, formed about 8,000 years ago. It is named after the Hotlum glacier on its northern face; its longest lava flow, the 500 feet (150 m) thick Military Pass flow, extends 5.5 miles (8.9 km) down its northwest face. Since the creation of the Hotlum Cone, a dacite dome intruded the cone and now forms the summit. The rock at the 600 feet (180 m) wide summit crater has been extensively hydrothermally altered by sulfurous hot springs and fumaroles there (only a few examples still remain). In the last 8,000 years, the Hotlum Cone has erupted at least eight or nine times. About 200 years ago the last significant Shasta eruption came from this cone and created a pyroclastic flow, a hot lahar (mudflow), and three cold lahars, which streamed 7.5 miles (12.1 km) down Shasta's east flank via Ash Creek. A separate hot lahar went 12 miles (19 km) down Mud Creek. This eruption was observed by the explorer La Pérouse, from his ship off the California coast, in 1786.[3]

During the last 10,000 years Shasta has erupted an average of every 800 years but in the past 4,500 years the volcano has erupted an average of every 600 years. The last significant eruption on Shasta may have occurred 200 years ago, as noted above. Mount Shasta can release volcanic ash, pyroclastic flows or dacite and andesite lava. Its deposits can be detected under nearby small towns totaling 20,000 in population. Shasta has an explosive, eruptive history. There are fumaroles on the mountain, which show that Shasta is still alive. The worst case scenario for an eruption is a large pyroclastic flow, such as what occurred in the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. Since there is ice, such as Whitney Glacier and Mud Creek Glacier, lahars would also result. Ash would probably blow inland, perhaps as far as eastern Nevada. There is a small chance that an eruption could also be bigger resulting in a collapse of the mountain, as happened when Mount Mazama in Oregon collapsed to form what is now called Crater Lake, but this is of much lower probability. The United States Geological Survey considers Shasta a dormant volcano, which will erupt again. It is impossible to pinpoint the date of next eruption, but it likely will occur within the next several hundred years.

At the time of Euro-American contact in the 1820s, the Native American tribes who lived within view of Mount Shasta included the Shasta, Okwanuchu, Modoc, Achomawi, Atsugewi, Karuk, Klamath, Wintu, and Yana tribes. The lore of some of the American Indians in the area held that Shasta is inhabited by the spirit chief Skell who descended from heaven to the mountain's summit.

The historic eruption of Mount Shasta in 1786 may have been observed by la Perouse, but this is disputed. Although perhaps first seen by Spanish explorers, the first reliably-reported land sighting of Mount Shasta by a European or American was by Peter Skene Ogden (a leader of a Hudson's Bay Company trapping brigade) in 1826. Beginning in the 1820s, Mount Shasta was a prominent landmark along what became known as the Siskiyou Trail, which runs at Mount Shasta's base. The Siskiyou Trail was located on the track of an ancient trade and travel route of Native American footpaths between California's Central Valley and the Pacific Northwest. By the 1860s and 1870s, Shasta was the subject of scientific and literary interest. A book by California pioneer and entrepreneur James Hutchings, titled Scenes of Wonder and Curiosity in California, contained an account of an early summit trip in 1855.[12] The summit was achieved (or nearly achieved) by John Muir, Josiah Whitney, Clarence King, and John Wesley Powell. In 1877, Muir wrote a dramatic popular article about an experience in which he survived an overnight blizzard on Shasta by lying in the hot sulfur springs found near the summit.>>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lassen_Peak wrote:
<<Before the arrival of white settlers, the areas surrounding Lassen Peak, especially in the east and south, were the traditional home of the northeastern Maidu. Lassen Peak was named in honor of Danish blacksmith Peter Lassen, who guided immigrants past the peak to Sacramento Valley in the 1830s. Lassen's trail, however, never found general long-term use because it was considered unsafe.

In 1864 Helen Tanner Brodt became the first woman to reach the summit of Lassen Peak. A tarn on Lassen was named Lake Helen in her honor.

On May 30, 1914 Lassen became active again after 27,000 years dormancy when it was shaken by a steam explosion. Such steam blasts occur when molten rock (magma) rises toward the surface of a volcano and heats shallow ground water. The hot water rises under pressure through cracks and, on nearing the surface, vaporizes and vents explosively. By mid-May 1915, more than 180 steam explosions had blasted out a 1,000-foot (300 m) wide crater near the summit of Lassen Peak.

Then the character of the eruption changed dramatically. On the evening of May 14, 1915, incandescent blocks of lava could be seen bouncing down the flanks of Lassen from as far away as the town of Manton, California 20 miles (30 km) to the west.[5] By the next morning, a growing dome of dacite lava (lava containing 63 to 68% silica) had filled the volcano’s crater.

Late on the evening of May 19, 1915, a large steam explosion fragmented the dacite dome, creating a new crater at the summit of Lassen Peak. No new magma was ejected in this explosion, but glowing blocks of hot lava from the dome fell on the summit and snow-covered upper flanks of Mount Lassen. These falling blocks launched a half mile (800 m) wide avalanche of snow and volcanic rock that roared 4 mi (6 km) down the volcano’s steep northeast flank and over a low ridge at Emigrant Pass into Hat Creek. As the hot lava blocks broke into smaller fragments, the snow melted, generating a mudflow of volcanic materials, called a lahar. The bulk of this lahar was deflected northwestward at Emigrant Pass and flowed 7 miles (11 km) down Lost Creek. Even after coming to rest, both the avalanche and lahar released huge volumes of water, flooding the lower Hat Creek Valley during the early morning hours of May 20. The lahar and flood destroyed six mostly not-yet-occupied summer ranch houses. Fortunately, the few people in these houses escaped with only minor injuries. Also during the night of May 19–20, dacite lava somewhat more fluid than that which erupted on the night of May 14–15 welled up into and filled the new crater at Lassen’s summit, spilled over low spots on its rim, and flowed 1,000 feet (300 m) down the steep west and northeast flanks of the volcano.



Then at 4:30 p.m. on May 22, after two quiet days, Lassen exploded in a powerful eruption (referred to as "the Great Explosion") that blasted volcanic ash, rock fragments and pumice high into the air. This created the larger and deeper of the two craters seen near the summit of the volcano today. A huge column of volcanic ash and gas rose more than 30,000 feet (9,100 m) into the air and was visible from as far away as Eureka, California, 150 miles (240 km) to the west.

Pumice falling onto the northeastern slope of Lassen Peak generated a high-speed avalanche of hot ash, pumice, rock fragments, and gas, called a pyroclastic flow, that swept down the side of the volcano, devastating a 3 square miles (8 km2) area. The pyroclastic flow rapidly incorporated and melted snow in its path. The water from the melted snow transformed the flow into a highly fluid lahar that followed the path of the May 19–20 lahar and rushed nearly 10 miles (16 km) down Lost Creek to Old Station. This new lahar released a large volume of water that flooded lower Hat Creek Valley a second time.

The powerful climactic eruption of May 22 also swept away the northeast lobe of the lava flow extruded two days earlier. The eruption produced smaller mudflows on all flanks of Lassen Peak, deposited a layer of volcanic ash and pumice traceable for 25 miles (40 km) to the northeast, and rained fine ash at least as far away as Winnemucca, Nevada, 200 miles (320 km) to the east. Together these events created the Devastated Area which is still sparsely populated by trees due to the low nutrient and high porosity of the soil.>>

rocksnstars wrote: it says "Earth and sky were made separately."

BMAONE23 wrote:Looking at this map of shasta area I would say that the image was taken from somewhere southeast of Shasta from a fairly elevated position Like the top of Black Fox Mountain or farther east. This would allow for the Galactic center to be in the west (setting in the early evenng of late autumn) The view of shasta must be from the east because this is the only view that doesn't allow for the inclusion of shastina in the image. This also properly orients the Shasts/Lassen alignment in the image. I think the arc of the MW is properly aligned with the mountains in the image as viewed from the east.

tonyhallas wrote:By this definition, every narrow band image, every CCD image, every DSLR image, every negative scanned to digital image ... even the images of Ansel Adams ( a superb lab technician) are fakes. Why? Because the images have been modified. The minute you touch those pixels, or burn and dodge like Adams did, the image is modified. Do you want to discuss where to draw the line?

Lazlo Nibble wrote:... unlike with True Image from False Kiva. That case is far worse because of the repeated claims to the contrary, from the implication in the "title" of the image through the ensuing discussion here. (In brief: The shadows on the bluffs could only have been created by light from the horizon shortly after sunset; despite Pacholka's claims in the discussion thread, the moon was in the wrong part of the sky at the time. But the sun set several hours before the Milky Way reached the depicted position in the sky -- indicating that the sky and landscape could not have been photographed at the same time.)

bystander wrote:(37 APODs, 92 TWAN, and numerous national publications) (what were your credentials, again)

rocksnstars wrote:I guess honesty has become a relative term. "..exposures tracking Earth and sky were made separately" is beyond vague to those of us who never expected to see a photo like this on APOD. I really can't believe they published it with only those words, knowing the whole story. Do they ever reply here?