The 11-foot-long principal filming model of the spaceship Nostromo from the movie “Alien” is the most expensive item in an online auction of entertainment memorabilia happening Thursday and Friday, Aug. 26-27. The model could go for $500,000.

Entertainment memorabilia items up for auction

LOS ANGLES — Pop culture lovers can acquire some of the most iconic memorabilia from film and TV memorabilia during an auction this week — if they have the cash.

The company Propstore is offering more than 850 lots during an online auction Thursday and Friday, Aug. 26-27. The bidding already is live online. Most of the items are related to science fiction, and while some lots are starting at a few hundred dollars, the major pieces are going for thousands of dollars or more.

Lovers of the movie “Jurassic Park” can buy a pair of stop-motion velociraptor puppets stating at $20,000. For a more modest price, the Judge Dredd costume Sylvester Stallone wore in the movie of the same name is opening bidding at $6,000.

The three items that look to fetch the highest prices are from a trio of classic genre films.

Bidding starts at $50,000 for the Well of Souls staff of Ra headpiece from “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and could end up going for $200,000. A Darth Vader promotional costume with helmet from 1977-78 will set bidders back at least $75,000. And the most expensive item in the auction and perhaps the largest as well is the 11-foot-long principal filming model of the spaceship Nostromo from “Alien.” The item is fetching $275,000 and could go for half a million.

But if the fantastical is not your thing, the fight pilot helmet Tom Cruise wore in the 1986 blockbuster “Top Gun” starts at $25,000. For a few thousand less you can get in on the bidding for Rick Dalton’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) yellow Cadillac Coupe De Ville from “Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood.” Or maybe displaying something from Mr. Chain-Blue Lightning himself is more your thing. The Colt Walker style revolver that Clint Eastwood wielded in “The Outlaw Josey Wales” already is going for $30,000.

You can check out more about the auction, including the full catalog, here: https://propstore.com/entertainment-memorabilia-live-auction-la-2020/.

Officers save elk from pool

ESTES PARK, Colo. — A police and a wildlife officer in a Colorado rescued a bull elk from a swimming pool.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife Northeast Region on social media platforms reported the bull elk was stuck in a pool in the town of Estes Park on Sunday, Aug. 23. Wildlife officer Chase Rylands and Estes Park Police officer Skylar Watson responded and found the large Cervidae still in the pool and unable to escape.

Rylands lassoed the elk’s antlers to pull it toward the stairs in the pool, according to the video of the rescue, and Watson ran the rope through a stair case railing and tied it to his pickup to create a pulley.

The operation proved a success, and the elk climbed from the pool with the rope dangling from its antlers.

The big fellow, however, trotted off before the officers could retrieve the rope, which was loose and, according to Colorado Parks and Wildlife, would fall off. Rylands also planned to monitor the elk.

You can watch the video of the rescue on the Facebook page of the Colorado Parks and Wildlife — Estes Park: www.facebook.com/CPWEstesPark/?ref=page_internal.

NASA’s Roman Space Telescope to detect rogue planets

WASHINGTON — A new space telescope looks to be able to spot rogue planets in our galaxy.

Rogue planets are bodies that drift through the galaxy free of any star’s gravity. Astronomers have tentatively discovered just a few of these galactic nomads because they are difficult to detect. But NASA in a press release Friday, Aug. 21, detailed how new simulations of the space telescope, which won’t launch until at least 2025, will be able to reveal rogue planets.

Astronomers Samson Johnson and Scott Gaudi from Ohio State University in Columbus co-authored a new paper in The Astronomical Journal about the Roman Space Telescope’s ability to find rogue planets using gravitational microlensing, which NASA explains this way:

“If a rogue planet aligns closely with a more distant star from our vantage point, the star’s light will bend as it travels through the curved space-time around the planet. The result is that the planet acts like a natural magnifying glass, amplifying light from the background star. Astronomers see the effect as a spike in the star’s brightness as the star and planet come into alignment. Measuring how the spike changes over time reveals clues to the rogue planet’s mass.”

Johnson and Gaudi’s study states microlensing events will last anywhere from a few hours to several tens of days, but the Roman Space Telescope is up to the task.

“As our view of the universe has expanded, we’ve realized that our solar system may be unusual,” Johnson, a graduate student who led the research effort, said in the NASA press release. “Roman will help us learn more about how we fit in the cosmic scheme of things by studying rogue planets.”