Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History: Please Present Both Sides of the Planet Debate
Dear Members of the Executive Committee, Astronomy Programs Manager and Assistant, and Staff Members,I am an astronomy graduate student, amateur astronomer and writer, and I am writing to you to express my dismay over your booking Mike Brown to speak in a November 14 lecture titled "How I Killed Pluto, and Why I Had It Coming." Specifically, my concern is that Brown represents only one side of a very much ongoing debate over the status of Pluto and definition of planet, yet he misrepresents his point of view as the only legimitate one in the astronomy community.In his blog "Mike Brown's Planets," Brown has repeatedly denied that a debate even exist

Between Asteroids and Planets: A New Category
Our current classification schemes for celestial objects are becoming more and more inadequate as new discoveries are being made. An article published in the October 9, 2009 issue of Science presents compelling evidence that Pallas, located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and considered an asteroid since its mid-19th-century demotion from planethood, is not an asteroid at all, but an object of an intermediate category between asteroid and planet, described by some as a "protoplanet," a "planetary embryo," and/or a "baby planet."Protoplanets are usually thought of as the precursors to full planets during the early fo

What Not to Teach or Display in A Classroom
Here is the poster child for what not to display in classrooms and what should not be taught to children: http://davidwboswell.wordpress.com/2009/09/20/pluto-correctness/ . Blogger David Boswell displays this image under an entry titled “Pluto Correctness,” illustrating an actual poster in his daughter’s preschool classroom. If a picture is worth a thousand words, this is clearly the picture for the worst possible education children can be given about the solar system. Pluto crossed out—what is the message here? Circling and crossing out exercises are oft

Planet Pluto Lives
This is a day I long hoped would not come, a sad anniversary for astronomy, and one that could have been avoided if even one IAU member had had the courage to stand up at this month’s General Assembly in Rio de Janeiro and ask fellow members to admit the mistake made three years ago in the infamous vote on planet definition and take action to set it right. But out of 2,100 attendees, not a single person exhibited that courage. At a General Assembly that started with a lower attendance than the notorious one three years ago in Prague (that one began with 2,500 attendees out of nearly 10,000 IAU members and ended with 424), the major denial of this ongoing is