It’s a Dead Heat: People are Split About Pluto

Have you voted in my poll? No? That means you can’t see the results showing that just as many people don’t give a sh*t whether Pluto is called a planet as there are people that do.

I don’t care what we call Pluto, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s out there and that it was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930. I met him once at the planetarium that bears his name in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Wonderful man, full of great stories. Very down to earth as well, he was easy to talk to and offered lots of advice for people wishing to contribute to professional astronomy using ordinary telescopes.

He discovered Pluto while working at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. He used a blink comparator, an device that alternated two different images of the same region of sky. As the two images ‘blinked’ back and forth, he could pick out objects that had moved appreciably from one image to another. It was much like showing two frames of a movie over and over again.

As Tombaugh looked at the two alternating frames, he noticed one dot dancing back and forth. That was Pluto.

From wikipedia:

The name “Pluto” was suggested by Venetia Burney, then an 11-year-old English school girl, who is still alive and living in England. It won out over numerous other suggestions partly because it was named after the Roman god of the underworld, who was able to render himself invisible, and partly because Percival Lowell’s initials PL formed the first 2 letters. The name Pluto was officially adopted on 1 May 1930.

And you thought it was named after the Disney character…

Of course, the way i worded my poll, many of you could also be voting for me to stop using foul language and couldn’t care less about what Pluto is called, so long as I don’t call it a mother f$%king planet.

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