What's with the name?
Rigel, also known as Beta Orionis, is the seventh brightest star in the sky. Additionally, the Rigel star system is occasionally referenced in the Star Trek series as having several inhabited, numbered planets — one of these, of course, being Rigel VII. Further, in The Simpsons, aliens Kang and Kodos are from Rigel VII (although in the original Treehouse of Horror, when they abduct the Simpsons family, their destination is actually Rigel IV). Interestingly, the names Kang and Kodos are also Star Trek references.
For the record, I am neither a Trekkie nor an astronomer, but I am a Simpsons fan.
Credit where it's due
This site is currently hosted by The Planet (coincidentally!) on a dedicated FreeBSD server running Lighttpd, PostgreSQL, and Python.
The stripe graphics have been stolen borrowed
from Nautilus,
the Gnome file manager. The drop
shadow image is based on the one used in the
A List Apart article on
CSS drop
shadows (although the technique I used is a bit different than the
one described in the article). The page background is a heavily
modified image of Saturn, originally found on the Tour of the Solar System on the University of Michigan's
High Resolution Doppler
Imager website. There are some pretty neat images there, including
a picture of Halley's Comet and an X-ray view of the sun.
