- Alioth (stars.astro.illinois.edu)
ALIOTH (Epsilon Ursae Majoris). The graceful curve of handle of the Big Dipper (the Plough in Great Britain), among the most famed of celestial sights, represents the tail of Ursa Major, the Greater Bear. Third star in from the end, “Alioth” relates not to a bear, but to a “black horse,” the name corrupted from the original and misassigned to the naked-eye companion of Mizar, which took on the vaguely similar name “Alcor.”
- United States and Canada Obsidian Source Catalog (sourcecatalog.com)
Welcome to the U. S. and Canada Obsidian and FGV (Fine-Grained Volcanic Toolstone) Source Mapping Project home page. For many years, we’ve been chasing down obsidian and FGV sources in the western United States and have promised that someday - when enough source information was finally available - we would begin creating maps that illustrate the geographic patterning of these archaeologically-significant prehistoric sources of natural glass and volcanic toolstone. That day has finally come and we are currently in the process of assembling and producing source maps for the western United States and Canada. Along with a few states (and provinces) for which we still lack good GIS coverages or adequate source data, we’re currently working on regional maps that illustrate the spatial ranges of several geographically-extensive sources.