Sky and Telescope - November 2015 - 16

News Notes

PLUTO I Dwarf Planet Occults Star in Sagittarius, Teams Head South

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Observers in New Zealand and Tasmania had front-row seats when Pluto covered a 12th-magnitude star on June 29, 2015.

The stars and planets really were
aligned on June 29th, when Pluto passed
directly in front of an obscure 12th-magnitude star in north-central Sagittarius.
The path of Pluto's "shadow" across Earth
fell mostly over open water between
Australia and Antarctica (see map above).
But several teams of astronomers fanned
out across New Zealand, Tasmania, and
southeastern Australia to record this rare
celestial opportunity.
A collaboration involving Williams
College, MIT, and Lowell Observatory

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November 2015 sky & telescope

Now that we've seen Pluto's surface features in detail for the ﬁrst time (see page
18), all those features need suitable names.
The International Astronomical Union gets
the ﬁnal say, but before the ﬂyby the New
Horizons team ran a public campaign to

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■ J. KELLY BEATTY

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Pluto Map

deployed observers at 12 telescopes in
nine locations. One of those, Mount John
Observatory on New Zealand's South
Island, was positioned very near to the
predicted centerline. During the event's
midpoint its telescopes recorded a central
ﬂash - created when Pluto's tenuous
atmosphere acted like a lens to refract a
concentrated beam of light toward Earth.
Eliot Young (Southwest Research Institute) dispatched seven teams, most of
which paired a professional observer with
an undergraduate student. Some used

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solicit ideas and votes within a few broad
categories: beings and locales associated
with the underworld, scientists and engineers
involved in the study of Pluto, historic explorers, and spacecraft. Charon will get monikers

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S&T: GREGG DINDERMAN, SOURCE: CARLOS ZULUAGA / MIT

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an existing telescope, but others lugged
"portable" 14-inch telescopes to desirable
locations. Veteran occultation observer
Bruno Sicardy (Paris Observatory) also
established observing stations at the
just-opened Greenhill Observatory near
Hobart, Tasmania, and at a robotic 0.6-m
telescope at Lauder, New Zealand.
John Talbot provided coordination
for the Royal Astronomical Society of
New Zealand, and more than two dozen
amateurs participated. Talbot reports
that many succeeded despite interference
from a nearly full Moon only 30°° away.
Meanwhile, NASA had dispatched the
Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared
Astronomy (SOFIA) to Christchurch, New
Zealand, to observe Southern objects for
six weeks. Flying above South Island's
coastline, its team of scientists, engineers,
and reporters watched the event unfold
from an altitude of 39,000 feet (11.9 km).
The occultation observations conﬁrmed that Pluto's atmosphere has
not entirely frozen onto its surface, as
planetary scientists had speculated. New
Horizons corroborated the result when
it swept past Pluto two weeks later (see
page 18). Read more about the adventures
Down Under at http://is.gd/plutoshadow.

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NASA / JHU-APL / SWRI

for ﬁctional travelers, their vessels, and their
destinations, along with authors, artists, and
directors who have envisioned those explorations. See ourpluto.org for details. ✦
■ J. KELLY BEATTY

http://www.is.gd/plutoshadow http://www.ourpluto.org

Sky and Telescope - November 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Sky and Telescope - November 2015