Post by w***@yahoo.comBack in the time Alien was being written, Zeta Reticuli was generally
understood to be 37 light years away from us, and then the boundaries
of outer rim back then was generally understood 55 light years from
Sol, while O'Bannon had the idea of it being 54 in the sketch
accompanying his original script, and I imagine that Dan might have
understood a little about the idea of where this star system was in
relation to the outer rim because it was quite well known about because
of the Betty and Barney Hill's abduction by extra-terrestrials. So, I
suppose even taking into account the idea of shifts in the positions of
stars in relation to one another over the centuries, the Nostromo would
still quite possibly be quite a distance away from the Zeta Reticuli
star system.
The point I'm making is that any constellation is like looking down a tube
ten miles long. Starting 9 miles away, and at intervals an eighth of a mile,
there are eight spots of light. Seen from the right end of the tube, there's
a pattern, but if you're near one of the spots of light, the pattern is
invisible.
Ergo, "the constellation Reticulum" is not a physical location in any
meaningful sense of the word.
IIRC, the component stars of a constellation are named alphabetically (Greek
alphabet) and in descending order of magnitude, i.e. brightest to dimmest.
Zeta is the sixth letter of the Greek alphabet, so Zeta II Reticuli is a
pretty dim star, i.e. six orders of magnitude dimmer than the brightest star
in the constellation. The brightest star could be pretty dim to begin with -
though if it were excessively dim, probably nobody would have noticed it to
begin with.
So the star in question, being dim, is either very remote (unlikely) or
pretty insignificant (more likely) and Nostromo is well out there in the
sticks, in terms of astronomical real estate.
The most interesting thing about the constellation is that "reticulum" is
latin for "net". As in the net carried by a fisherman or gladiator with net
and trident.
Well and truly bagged.