Senior Editor Michael Bakich’s last blog post, “Party in Pluto Park,” details his experiences at an event in New Mexico to commemorate Clyde Tombaugh’s 16-inch telescope. To be clear, Tombaugh discovered Pluto while he worked in Arizona, but he spent most of his life in New Mexico.
Bakich’s post from Wednesday, “Working on a classic,” received a passionate comment from a reader requesting that Michael not refer to Pluto as an “ex-planet.” It’s clear Pluto’s classification is a hot-button topic for many of you. Well, the planets must be aligning, because Pluto is showing up all over my pop-culture radar.
I came across a charming music video of a song by Jonathan Coulton called, “I’m your moon” from a few years ago. Perhaps some of you have already seen the video or heard the song. Coulton wrote it from the perspective of Charon serenading Pluto. In the song, Charon tries to remind Pluto that despite the International Astronomical Union’s 2006 decision to revoke its planetary status, “because you don’t have pretty rings,” Pluto should take heart in the fact that the two bodies “go round and round together.”
After I watched Coulton’s video, I remembered that Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, appeared on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Wednesday night to promote his new book The Pluto Files. So I headed over to The Daily Show web site to see what Tyson had to say about Pluto.
During the conversation with Stewart, Tyson — referring to the planet’s reclassification as a plutoid — suggested that “Pluto had it coming. ... He was an oddball from the beginning.” Shortly thereafter, Stewart shouted, “What did Pluto ever do to you?!!” Entertaining stuff.
We plan to post a review of Tyson’s book soon.