Today saw the release of the new Prometheus featurette titled “Origins,” thankfully it doesn’t spoil anything in regards to the mystery of how the movie will play out for the crew of the spacecraft Prometheus. What it does confirm is that the lifeforms they track down, is on what Ridley Scott calls the Planet Zeta II Reticuli which is quite interesting as this is where the crew of the Nostromo say they’re in the vicinity of when they picked up the so-called distress signal in “Alien”

Alien Fact 1 | The Planets

Zeta Reticuli (ζ Ret, ζ Reticuli) is an actual ‘REAL’ binary star system in the southern constellation of Reticulum. From the southern hemisphere the Zeta Reticuli 1 & 2 can be seen with the naked eye as a double star in very dark skies. Based upon parallax measurements, this system is located at a distance of about 39 light-years (12 parsecs) from the Earth, also quoted in the original Alien movie.

Zeta Reticuli is circled in Red

Alien Fact 2 | The Robots

A nice little touch I came across today was that the synthetic robots’ names in the series are in alphabetical order, according to film release dates: Ash is in “Alien” (1979), Bishop is in “Aliens” (1986) and Alien 3 (1992), Call is in “Alien: Resurrection” (1997) and now David, played by Michael Fassbender in “Prometheus.”.