Persephone [Περσεφονηία]...change of seasons

Persephone symbolic/mythological natural explanation of physical phenomenon, bringing about the change of seasons as would be fitting since Fall has just begun. Sure, there are scientific explanations for the change of seasons but it is always soothing to think about the ancients and their explanations. Enjoy, the mythology of Persephone and the season.

Persephone is the goddess of the underworld in Greek mythology. She is the daughter of Zeus and Demeter, goddess of the harvest. Persephone was such a beautiful young woman that everyone loved her, even Hades wanted her for himself. One day, when she was collecting flowers on the plain of Enna, the earth suddenly opened and Hades rose up from the gap and abducted her. None but Zeus, and the all-seeing sun, Helios, had noticed it. Broken-hearted, Demeter wandered the earth, looking for her daughter until Helios revealed what had happened. Demeter was so angry that she withdrew herself in loneliness, and the earth ceased to be fertile. Knowing this could not continue much longer, Zeus sent Hermes down to Hades to make him release Persephone. Hades grudgingly agreed, but before she went back he gave Persephone a pomegranate (or the seeds of a pomegranate, according to some sources). When she later ate of it, it bound her to underworld forever and she had to stay there one-third of the year. The other months she stayed with her mother. When Persephone was in Hades, Demeter refused to let anything grow and winter began. This myth is a symbol of the budding and dying of nature. In the Eleusinian mysteries, this happening was celebrated in honor of Demeter and Persephone, who was known in this cult as Kore.--Encyclopedia Mythica.

All will be fine for Persephone.

Pluto...a reader's contribution

Hades, Persephone, and Cerberus the three headed dog that guarded the entrance to Hell.

Since I have posted material regarding Pluto and its status as a bona fide planet, I have received some comments from Laurel Kornfeld, an aficionado of astronomy and quite passionate about the planet Pluto. At Tyson, Weintraub, Tombaugh & Pluto she stated that there were numerous literary references to Pluto and Ms. Kornfeld supplied some samples. Rather than have them buried as merely a reply, I have chosen to reproduce them below.

From: astropoetry

Banishing Pluto

I can hear them talking outside my door,

stalking in their new, shrunken

solar system’s shadows,

hoping I don’t know they’re there,

daring each other to be

The One who Knocks and

breaks the news to me:

my old planetary identity has

been wiped away, replaced

by something smaller, feebler,

and given grudgingly at that,

sentencing me to exile in

the icy wastes of the Great

Out There.


Surprise, surprise, no-one wants to take

the knife and stab me in my back personally

after their 80 years of flattery

and false colour declarations

of devoted love. Demoted now,

a planet no longer, I’d be lying if I said

I wasn’t bitter; no quitter I,

I always tried to be the world

Clyde wanted me to be.

I thought I was safe! After all,

around me three moons loyally swooned –

Ha, shows how much I knew! Their fine

committee has decreed beloved Charon to be

nothing but a mere near neighbour,

declared that all we had in common

all along was a barren barycentre.


Listen to them arguing!

Flinging blame, claiming they

had never really wanted to wrench

away my hard-won title;

that they’d felt all long I was entitled

to the same respect as Sol’s

other whirling worlds! What weasel words!

I heard them call me cruel names,

blaming the inferior eyes of those

sepia-toned stargazers for giving me more credit

than my size and style deserves.

But most bizarre of all, some seem to

truly believe they’re showing me a kindness,

being merciful, delivering me from

the misery of my celestial self-delusion;

by taking away my name, and claim

to planetary fame they feel they do me good,

pull me back to reality

where Copernicus’ runts know their place

and only real, grown-up planets pace

patiently around the Sun.


So what grim fate awaits me now?

Banishment, from the crumpled maps and charts

that children hunch over in their rooms

as science project deadlines loom;

exile from the Sun’s grand mansion,

thrown onto the KBO-hobo littered street

to seek a new life for myself

on a dusty shelf in the IAU’s

spare room, dumped there like some

tasteless piece of memorabilia

from an older, embarrassing age.


But the rage I feel at being

reduced from true ice world to “dwarf planet”

will never go away! Make up your minds!

Am I a planet or am I not?

If not then do not use that precious

word to describe me for it is cruel!

Under your petty rules

then your so-beloved Neptune

and Jupiter should be exiled too;

tumbling Trojan rocks and rubble

trail and lead Jove as he rolls around

the Sun, and why, when cerulean Neptune’s

orbit intersects with mine am only I

cast out from the light?


As for the precious Homeworld,

Earth’s “area” has not been cleared of clutter

any more than mine! Jagged Atens,

Apollos and Amors jostle as they fire

like tracer rounds ‘cross Terra’s bows,

so how exactly does her rock-saturated,

swooping path around the Sun not sentence her

to exile in the Kingdom of the Dwarves?


Shame on you, shame on you all

for all those years of lies.

True, my size may be suspiciously small,

and my orbit I’ll admit is unconventional,

more drawn-out loop than perfect ratio ring –

and yes I swoop first high above then fall

far below the plane in which my surviving

solar siblings play.

But why exile me for that?



You think that with your clapping hands

and silly, flapping cards you voted me

out of existence; that now I am

“no more”, a mere bad memory banished

to the far shore of this solar system

but you are wrong, and when your tiny,

metal flea buzzes by me in 2015 you’ll see

how cruel you were.

When my craters and canyons fill

its cameras’ field of view,

and images of my frost-bright, ice-white

landscapes fill the pages of the papers

that so gleefully decreed me dead

you’ll lift your heads to the starry sky

and sigh “We were wrong, it was

a planet all along…”

© Stuart Atkinson 2006

From Ms. Kornfeld's website:

As a writer, I cannot help but view this phenomenon from a literary perspective. In "Star Trek," Kirk and Spock make the interesting observation that every myth has some modicum of truth in it. I have always had a personal fascination with mythology, and Pluto, named after the Greek/Roman lord of the underworld, has a wealth of mythological folklore associated with it. The underworld, viewed as the abode of the dead, also represented to ancient peoples the physical underground where seeds lie buried in the winter--and sometimes for many years--only to germinate and be "reborn" when spring comes or when sunlight long blocked by a tree or other object finally reaches that seed. In Babylonian mythology, the spirit of vegetation was represented by the god Tammuz, who descended to the underworld as summer ended, the harvest commenced, and the sun began to wane.

This connection with the seasonal cycle continued in the Greek/Roman myth of Pluto's abduction of Persephone, the maiden of spring. In the wake of Persephone's having been abducted, her mother, the grain goddess Demeter, also known as Ceres, in her grief withheld her bounty and refused to allow anything to grow, thus leading to the desolation of winter. Only when a compromise was reached, and Persephone was permitted to spend a portion of the year above ground with her mother, did Demeter allow vegetation to return and even teach agriculture to human civilization.

Ancient peoples resorted to stories to explain the cycle of the seasons because they knew these phenomena occurred but did not fully understand why. Yet these myths contain within them a greater truth, an understanding of life as a cycle of death and rebirth in which nothing is truly lost, only transformed.

At the Great Planet Debate, one participant asked whether any of us interpreted any symbolism in the banishment of the planet named after the lord of the dead. That's the type of question literary types like me love to ponder. Pluto was named after the god of the underworld by 11-year-old Venetia Burney, a child fascinated by both mythology and astronomy, because it is a dark and cold place. Though it is not scientific, in my literary mind, I think there is significance in our effectively banishing the planet that represents the unknown, the dark, the enigmatic, the mysterious, the intense representation of death and new life, to some sort of astronomical netherworld. Both the mythology and the astronomy of Pluto challenge the limits of what we know and make us think about subjects that make us uncomfortable, subjects we often would rather stay buried.

Symbolically, Pluto's refusal to "die" as a planet fits beautifully with the entire mythology and folklore for which it is named. In this era when education focuses on learning across the disciplines, namely examining the same subject in the areas of science, math, history, literature, art, music, etc., it will make a fascinating research paper topic for students.

Speaking of literature, I would like to share, with proper attribution, a poem I found online linking Pluto the planet with Pluto the god of the underworld and with Tammuz, the Babylonian vegetation deity. It is titled, "The Death of Pluto."

"The Death of Pluto"

Adapted by Robert Croog (by substituting Pluto for Tammuz) from the poem by Saul Tchernichowsky, "The Death of Tammuz," Hebrew, translated by L. V. Snowman, published in A Treasury of Jewish Poetry from Biblical Times to the Present, edited by Nathan and Marynn Ausubel.

"Pluto is dead," Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology, discoverer of Eris, told reporters in a teleconference, August 25, 2006.

"And behold, there sat the women, weeping." Ezekiel 8:14

"Go, daughters of Zion
And weep you for Pluto,
For Pluto, the beautiful Pluto is dead;
And days dark with cloud and eclipse of the soul,
Autumn days endless the days are ahead.

Let us rise with the sun
In the spring of the morning,
To the forest where lingers the

darkness of night,
To the forest where visions and secrets are hidden,
To the altar of Pluto-- high place of the light.

What dance shall we dance
Around the high altar?
What dance shall we dance for

Pluto this day?
To the left, to the right, and sevenfold seven,
We shall bow to him, calling 'return to our play.'

To the left, to the right,
And seven by seven,
But hand in hand straightly, and

footing it slow;
Pluto wherever he be we shall seek him,
The lads and the maidens apart they will go.

We have sought on the roads
And the highways for Pluto,
Where the crossroads lie bathed in the

light of the sun,
Sweet to the heart in their warmth and their peace,
The sparrows fly there and the larks carillon.

We have sought Pluto
In thickets where leaves fall,
In mazes of holly and forests of pine;
Peradventure he sleeps among incense

of spices,
In the circle of toadstools, the faery shrine.

We have sought Pluto
But vain 'twas to find him,
We clambered the hills and came down

through the dell,
We followed the traces of all mystic wonders--
The abode of the gods and wherever they dwell;

In the grove, in the hedges,
By trees that are altar fuel,
The woodland recesses-- all fodder for

fire,
But only the sparrows cried in their hunger
About the high place-- ruins trodden in mire.

No trace of the fairies
Was found in the meadows,
With the whispering brook their

laughter ceased, too,
Calves graze in the meadows and there the lambs frolic
Round the springs and the wells with fall of the dew.

O, daughters of Zion,
Go mourn in beholding
How the world on its course dull and

troublous is sped,
The distress of a world whose spirit is darkened,
For Pluto, the beautiful Pluto, is dead."

The comment below is by Philip Brown, who quoted the above poem:

"I am inspired by this poem and its themes which are symbolic of Pluto: death, youth, hidden and mysterious places, occult energy and return to the Earth, decay and regeneration in nature, and a playful sense of foreboding. It is apropos of Pluto's recent demotion from planetary status, and the comments of Mike Brown."

The poem above is powerful, but I am as convinced as ever that Pluto is not dead, that this is not the end. It may not be a scientific assertion, but I believe Pluto the planet will follow the archetype of death and rebirth for which it is named, the death of winter giving way to the rebirth of spring.

And Ms. Kornfeld concludes with a teaser of some literary merit that in her willingness may share here at some future date.

On a personal note, while I wish Pluto's demotion had never happened, I am immensely grateful for the many wonderful people I have met in the quest to get this decision reversed; for the knowledge it has brought and love for astronomy it has rekindled in my life; for the numerous experiences I have had that would otherwise never have come my way--everything from the wonderful club known as Amateur Astronomers, Inc., in Cranford, NJ; to new friends around the world; to the opportunity to see Jupiter, Saturn, the Ring Nebula, and so many other celestial objects through a telescope; even to reconnect with various members of my family. Pluto's plight has also inspired the artist in me; the result is I have written a play of more than 100 pages incorporating the mythology and symbolism of Pluto in a fantasy-drama tale of its demotion and reinstatement. Just this Friday, I received the official copyright certification for this play, which I hope to publish and someday bring to production. It is no understatement to say that Pluto has changed my life.

For further reading:

A Double Planet?: Pluto and Charon

by

Isaac Asimov, Frank Reddy , and Greg Walz-Chojnacki

ISBN: 0836812328

Beyond Pluto

by

John Davies

ISBN: 0521800196

Clyde Tombaugh: Discoverer of Planet Pluto

by

David H. Levy

ISBN: 0816513171

How Did We Find Out About Pluto?

by

Isaac Asimov and Erika Kors [illustrator]

ISBN: 0802769926

Ice Worlds on the Ragged Edge of the Solar System

by

Alan Stern and Jacqueline Mitton

ISBN 3-527-40556-9

Out of the Darkness the Planet Pluto

by

Clyde William Tombaugh and P. Moore

ISBN: 0451619978

Pluto

by

Carmen Bredeson

ISBN: 0531117847

Pluto

by

Larry Dane Brimner

ISBN: 0516264990

Pluto

by

Steve Potts

ISBN: 1583401016

Pluto

by

Dana Meachen Rau

ISBN: 0756502977

Pluto

by

Gregory Vogt

ISBN: 1562943936

Pluto and Charon : Ice Worlds on the Ragged Edge of the Solar System

by

Alan Stern and Jacqueline Mitton

ISBN: 0471152978

Pluto and Charon

by

Alan Stern, David J. Tholen and S. Alan Stern [editors]

ISBN: 0816518408

Pluto: The Ninth Planet

by

Michael D. Cole

ISBN: 0766019535

Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto

by

Tim Goss

ISBN: 1588109186


"Naming Pluto"--a film

Persephone [Περσεφονηία]...change of seasons

Pluto="Plutoid"

Pluto not fitting definition

"The Pluto Files" by Neil deGrasse Tyson

Tyson, Weintraub, Tombaugh & Pluto

Tyson's interview with "Time" on Pluto and planets

What's in a name?--Pluto

While I can understand Ms. Kornfeld's passion for Pluto, I have no problem keeping the planet's lore public and allowing the astronomer's to carry on their business of definition and reclassification, if necessary, for their scientific purposes. One does not preclude the other, they are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and neither invalidates opposing positions. Furthermore, I welcome Ms. Kornfeld to contribute relevant materials and perspectives.

Deceased--Venetia Phair

Venetia Burney Phair
July 11th, 1918 to April 30th, 2009

"Venetia Phair Dies at 90; as a Girl, She Named Pluto"

by

William Grimes

May 11th, 2009

The New York Times

Frozen and lonely, Planet X circled the far reaches of the solar system awaiting discovery and a name. It got one thanks to an 11-year-old British girl named Venetia Burney, an enthusiast of the planets and classical myth.

On March 14, 1930, the day newspapers reported that the long-suspected "trans-Neptunian body" had been photographed for the first time, she proposed to her well-connected grandfather that it be named Pluto, after the Roman god of the underworld.

And so it was.

Venetia Phair, as she became by marriage, died April 30 in her home in Banstead, in the county of Surrey, England. She was 90. The death was confirmed by her son, Patrick.

Venetia, on the fateful day that Pluto popped into her head, was having breakfast with her mother and her grandfather, Falconer Madan, retired librarian of the Bodleian Library at Oxford. He had exciting news to tell. Scientists at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., had just photographed a planet lying beyond Neptune. Its existence had been postulated since the late 19th century, and astronomers working under Percival Lowell, the observatory's founder, had been chasing it photographically since 1906. Now theory had become fact.

"He wondered what it should be called," Mrs. Phair recalled in the documentary film, "Naming Pluto," released last month. "We all wondered, and then I said, 'Why not call it Pluto?' And the whole thing stemmed from that."

Mr. Madan passed the idea along to his friend Herbert Hall Turner, professor of astronomy at Oxford. Pluto, he suggested in a letter, was an excellent name for "the big obscure new baby."

Mr. Turner, as it happened, was in London for a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society, where word of the new planet had members buzzing, and proposals for a name flew fast and furious. "I think PLUTO excellent!!" he wrote to Mr. Madan on his return. "We did not manage to think of anything so good at the RAS yesterday. The only at all meritorious suggestion was Kronos, but that won't do alongside Saturn." (Kronos is the Greek equivalent of Saturn.)

Mr. Turner immediately sent a telegram to Flagstaff: "Naming new planet, please consider PLUTO, suggested by small girl Venetia Burney for dark and gloomy planet."

Unbeknownst to Venetia, a spirited battle ensued, with suggestions flying thick and fast. Minerva looked like the front runner, until it was pointed out that the name already belonged to an asteroid. Other candidates included Zeus, Atlas and Persephone. The Austrian engineer and cosmologist Hans Hörbiger proposed the inscrutable and unpronounceable Onehtn, meaning "first trans-Neptune."

Capt. Charles E. Freeman, the superintendent of the Naval Observatory in Washington, regarded Pluto as a long shot. "Pluto is the prototype of Satan in many minds, and drops out for that reason, perhaps," he said.

In the end, scientists at the Lowell Observatory voted unanimously for Pluto, partly because its first two letters could be interpreted as an homage to Percival Lowell, and on May 24 the new planet received its official name.

Mr. Madan gave his granddaughter a five-pound note, and the family added yet another feather to its cap: in 1877, Mr. Madan’s brother Henry, a housemaster at Eton, had successfully proposed that the two dwarf moons of Mars be named Phobos and Deimos, two attendants of the Roman war god, whose names mean fear and terror.

"Pluto is an excellent name, for two reasons," Neil deGrasse Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium and author of "The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet," said in a telephone interview. "First, it's a Roman god, as are the rest of the large objects in the solar system, so it conforms to the rules of the time, and second, Pluto is the god of the underworld, a distant place you don’t want to go to. Who could not love the name?"

Venetia Katherine Burney was born in Oxford, where her father, the Rev. Charles Fox Burney, was a professor of scriptural interpretation. He died when Venetia was 6, and she and her mother went to live with Mr. Madan.

Venetia developed an interest in astronomy after playing a game with other children in which lumps of clay, standing for the planets, were placed on a lawn in their positions relative to the sun.

She attended Downe House, a boarding school in Berkshire, and, after studying mathematics at Newnham College, Cambridge, became a chartered accountant. She later taught economics and math at two girls' schools in southwest London. In 1947 she married Maxwell Phair, a classicist, who became housemaster and head of English at Epsom College. She is survived by her son, of Cheltenham.

Mrs. Phair tended to play down her stroke of genius. She came up with Pluto, she said, simply because it was one of the few important Roman gods still available for planetary duty. "Whether I thought about a dark, gloomy Hades, I'm not sure," she told the BBC in 2006.

Regardless, Pluto was an instant success. Walt Disney used it for Mickey Mouse's dog, and it provided the name for Element 94 in the Periodic Table, plutonium, which was first identified in 1941. In 1987 the asteroid 6235 Burney was named in Mrs. Phair’s honor, as was a dust-measuring instrument on board New Horizons, the NASA spacecraft that took off for Pluto in 2006.

Mrs. Phair took it in stride when the International Astronomical Union decreed that Pluto was not a planet at all. It was a dwarf planet, and not even the largest one, a lump of rock and ice orbiting in a ring of icy debris known as the Kuiper Belt.

Some face was saved last year when the union announced the coining of the term "plutoid" to designate a dwarf planet beyond the orbit of Neptune. More vexing to Mrs. Phair was the persistent notion that she had taken the name from the Disney character. "It has now been satisfactorily proven that the dog was named after the planet, rather than the other way around," she told the BBC. "So, one is vindicated."

Alan M. MacRobert, a senior editor at Sky and Telescope, foresees sweeter vindication ahead. "In the year 4,000 A.D., when Pluto is hollowed out and millions of people are living inside," he said, "the name of Venetia Burney may be the only thing that Great Britain is remembered for."

"Venetia Phair dies at 90; as a girl, she named Pluto"

At age 11, the keen student of mythology suggested naming the newly discovered planet after the Roman god of the underworld.

May 11th, 2009

Associated Press

Venetia Phair, who was 11 years old when she suggested Pluto as the name of the newly discovered planet, has died in England. She was 90.

She died at home in Epsom, south of London, on April 30, her family said. The cause of death was not disclosed.

Phair suggested the name to her grandfather at breakfast in 1930.

"My grandfather, as usual, opened the paper, The Times, and in it he read that a new planet had been discovered. He wondered what it should be called. We all wondered," she recalled in a short film, "Naming Pluto," released earlier this year.

"And then I said, 'Why not call it Pluto?' And the whole thing stemmed from that."

Her grandfather was Falconer Madan, the retired librarian of the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. He relayed the suggestion to his friend Herbert Hall Turner, professor of astronomy at Oxford, who on that day was at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society, where possible names for the planet were being discussed.

Turner then passed on the suggestion to Clyde W. Tombaugh, who made the discovery at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona.

When the name was publicly announced May 1, 1930, Phair said her grandfather rewarded her with a five-pound note.

(The same purchasing power today would be about 230 pounds, or $350.)

"This was unheard of then. As a grandfather, he liked to have an excuse for generosity," she told the BBC in 2006.

She was fascinated by astronomy, and recalled playing a game at school using clay lumps to mark out the relative positions of the planets. She was also a keen student of mythology and knew about Pluto, the Roman name for the Greek god of the underworld, Hades.

"There were practically no names left from classical mythology. Whether I thought about the dark and gloomy Hades, I'm not sure," she told the BBC.

She tartly rejected any suggestion that the planet was named for the Disney dog.

"It has now been satisfactorily proven that the dog was named after the planet, rather than the other way round. So, one is vindicated," she said.

The International Astronomical Union downgraded Pluto in 2006 to a dwarf planet -- based on the observation that Pluto was a large chunk in the Kuiper Belt of solar debris.

Phair said she was indifferent about Pluto's change of status, "though I suppose I would prefer it to remain a planet."

Born Venetia Burney on July 11, 1918, she studied mathematics at Cambridge University, and taught economics and math until retiring in the 1980s.

An asteroid discovered in 1987 was named in her honor: 6235 Burney.

Her husband, Maxwell Phair, died in 2006.

She is survived by their son, Patrick.

"New Horizons Team Remembers Venetia Phair, the ‘Girl Who Named Pluto’"

May 8th, 2009

New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern presents a plaque to Venetia Burney Phair in December 2006, commemorating the name "Venetia" for the New Horizons Student Dust Counter.

Plaque Commemorating the Venetia Burney SDC:

"New Horizons, the first mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, is proud to announce that the student instrument aboard our spacecraft is hereby named "The Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter" in honor of Mrs. Venetia Burney Phair, who at age of eleven nominated the name Pluto for our solar system's ninth planet. May "Venetia" inspire a new generation of students to explore our solar system, to make discoveries which challenge the imagination, and to pursue learning all through their lives."

The team guiding the first mission to Pluto is fondly remembering Venetia Burney Phair, the "little girl" who named the ninth planet when it was discovered nearly 80 years ago. Mrs. Phair died April 30 at her home in Epsom, England, at age 90. "Venetia's interest and success in naming Pluto as a schoolgirl caught the attention of the world and earned her a place in the history of planetary astronomy that lives on," says New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern.

In June 2006, the New Horizons team renamed the spacecraft’s Student Dust Counter instrument in her honor, calling it the "Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter" (VBSDC, or just "Venetia" for short). Six months later, in a small ceremony in Mrs. Phair's home, Stern and SDC Principal Investigator Mihaly Horanyi presented her with a plaque, certificate and spacecraft model to commemorate the renaming. "She was a thoroughly intelligent, likable and endearing woman," Stern says. "The entire New Horizons team is saddened by her passing."

The New Horizons dust counter is the first the first science instrument on a NASA planetary mission to be designed, built and operated by students, and by late next year it will be operating farther out in the solar system than any dust measurement instrument in history. Stern and the SDC team members thought it fitting to name instrument built by students after Mrs. Phair, who was just an 11-year-old student herself when she made her historic suggestion of a name for Pluto in 1930.

"Her death deeply saddens the former and current crew of the VBSDC instrument," says Horanyi, who, like the dust counter student team, is from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "Her contribution will be lasting, not only by naming Pluto, but also by giving an example to young people of the value of intellectual curiosity and the rewards of a lifelong interest in science and discovery."

Read about the instrument renaming and see photos of the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter

The Guardian: Venetia Phair, who named Pluto, dies at 90

The Telegraph: Venetia Phair

Prairie State government declares Pluto a planet

Ancient astronaut poll

Did ancient astronauts visit Earth?

Yes: 4 [50%]

No: 3 [37%]

Maybe: 1 [12%]

UFOs, diversity of the world's mythology, literary figures [Frankensteins, Draculas], bad science, science fiction, God--all represent something that provides a belief in the unknown, comfort, and in some cases salvation. It can also demean man's accomplishments and potential. Man is quite intelligent and hasn't even reached the plateau of knowledge and skills and conceptual formulations of ones own existence and position in the universe.

The visitations by ancient astronauts is a desire to lessen the feeling of loneliness...of some hope in that they may have left some valuable secrets behind, or will return and save us from ourselves and a dying planet...cure diseases, eliminate poverty, see the face of God. Is it really unconceivable that the pyramids were built by mankind's intellect and ingenuity...did aliens really assist? I don't think so. Face it, there isn't one item of physical evidence that would substantiate alien visitors. Just because an event or object cannot be explained doesn't mean that its antecedent is alien. It is a matter of faith and a wish that things would be different. Like Antoine De Saint-Exupery said..."The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves...but in our attitude towards them".


Birth of a very popular mythology

British UFO data released

Conspiracies...diehard myth makers

Frankenstein and bioethics is on campus at WSU

G. K. Chesterton--myths/logic

King Solomon's Mines...a myth challenged

March...astronomical lion and lamb

Mars...Percival Lowell's romance with the red planet

Myths/science; science/myths--needed...compatible?

Oh Hell...cannot forget this guy and location

Origin of science

Persephone [Περσεφονηία]...change of seasons

Pleiades and mythology

Pseudoscience...be careful

"Science, Knowledge, Wisdom, Life"

Science, Philosophy, Religion...the best?

Shroud of Turin to be questioned once again

Simple science and priestly control

Stanhengues...early astronomy?...and new digs

UFOs and foreign invasions [Earthly kind]

For those that selected "Yes", I invite you to share your reasoning and perspective.

Name those moons...Pluto's children

"Oregon Astronomy Watch: Help Name the New Moons of Pluto"

February 11th, 2013

Oregon Coast Beach Connection

Oh, the plight of poor Pluto. A few years back, the famed last planet in the solar system was downgraded to not even a planet at all, and then eventually bumped up slightly to a planetesimal.

Now, however, the little celestial-body-that-could has what appears to be a new pair of children, and astronomers need help naming them.

Hubble Space Telescope snapped some images in 2011 and 2012 that revealed two previously unknown moons orbiting Pluto. At this time, they are merely called P4 and P5, and astronomers are looking to rectify that. They are asking the public's help in naming the new moons.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute in Mountain View, California, is heading up the name-choosing process. With the website  Plutorocks.com , you can vote for your favorite name.

SETI said the tradition has been that Pluto's moons were named after characters or aspects of Greek myths regarding Hades, or the Underworld. The three Pluto currently has are Charon, Nix and Hydra.

The nominated names to choose from are Acheron, Alecto, Cerberus, Erebus, Eurydice, Hercules, Hypnos, Lethe, Obol, Orpheus, Persephone and Styx. You can vote for those at the website.

You can still write-in your own favorite, however. There is a write-in form on the site.

SETI said the ground rules are: “Feel free to come back, but please do not vote more than once per day, just so everybody gets a fair chance to make their opinion known. We will take your votes and suggestions into consideration when we propose the names for P4 and P5 to the International Astronomical Union (IAU).”

Voting deadline is noon EST on Monday, February 25.

P4=Kerberos; P5=Styx...Pluto's new moons

"Pluto’s Newly Discovered Moons Get Official Names"

by

Andrew Fazekas

July 2nd, 2013

STAR STRUCK

Back in February we told you about an online naming contest for Pluto’s two newly discovered, smallest moons (P4 and P5). Now, nearly half million votes later, the moons have their official names.

Formally approved by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the governing body that officially names celestial objects,  P4,  which is 15 miles (20 kilometers) across, has been named Kerberos, after the three-headed dog of ancient Greek legend. P5, at 20 miles (30 kilometers) in diameter, will now be known as Styx, after the mythological river that leads to the realm of the dead.

The new cosmic recruits join the family Pluto’s three other moons–Charon, Nix and Hydra–all named for characters associated with the Underworld of Greek and Roman mythology.

Both Kerberos and Styx were fist spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2011 and 2012, as part of a survey of the Pluto system in preparation for a NASA probe flying by the dwarf planet in 2015. The spacecraft, called New Horizon, is still 600 million miles (1 billion kilometers) from the icy planet. But when it arrives in the neighborhood New Horizon is expected to get up-close portraits of Pluto’s recently discovered moons.

Vulcan Controversy?

This cosmic contest, which was started as a public educational initiative by the scientists who found these tiny moons, turned out to be quite popular worldwide. By the the time voting finished  there were over 450,000 votes with front runners that included, other than the eventual winners, Persephone,Orpheus and the top vote getter – Vulcan.

However to the dismay of legions of Star Trek fans–and to the moons’ discoverer–the name ‘Vulcan’ did not make the grade with professional astronomers . It had been proposed by actor William Shatner, a.k.a Captain James T. Kirk.

“The IAU gave serious consideration to this name, which happens to be shared by the Roman god of volcanoes,”read an official statement from the SETI Institute, which had sponsored the naming contest. “However, because that name has already been used in astronomy, and because the Roman god is not closely associated with Pluto, this proposal was rejected.”

Within minutes of the announcement Shatner tweeted his disappointment.