We are going to Pluto. On July 14th, NASA’s New Horizon spacecraft will fly by Pluto and send home the first detailed photos of this world. And Pluto is a perfect match for our Driftless Area. When UW Space Place constructed their Planet Trek scale model of the Solar System, they placed the Sun at Monona Terrace in Madison and the marker for Pluto 22 miles away in Mt. Horeb at the edge of the Driftless Area.

Pluto and the Driftless Area are both eccentric. We’ve all had those conversations trying to explain to people where we are from. We are off the map. Rand McNally’s Universal Map of Outer Space from my childhood still hangs on my wall. There’s Pluto, a weird shade of green, on the fringes, with a question mark.

Like the Driftless Area, Pluto has been difficult to classify. Planet? Dwarf Planet? Minor Planet? Plutino? Plutoid? Kuiper Belt Object? Trans-Neptunian Object? It’s like trying to decide when a brook becomes a creek and when a creek becomes a river. I try to avoid the debate by saying it’s a world, one we are about to see for the first time. Just as the Driftless Area preserves ancient landscapes and rare species, Pluto preserves some of the oldest material in the Solar System with ices billions of years old.

Thanks to low mass, a powerful booster, and a gravity assist from Jupiter, New Horizons is now cruising at over 30,000 mph. That’s 8 1/2 miles every second. At that speed, it could journey the Lower Wisconsin Riverway from Prairie du Sac to Prairie du Chien in 11 seconds, though I suspect the Riverway Board might have something to say about the wake it would leave. Even at that speed, it has taken 9 ½ years since its January 2006 launch to reach Pluto. Pluto, like the Driftless Area, teaches patience.

I love how the Driftless Area has attracted its share of amateurs and enthusiasts. Madison and Milwaukee have their universities and museums, but we have the visions of Dr. Evermor’s Forevertron and Alex Jordan’s Infinity Room. Pluto’s discovery in 1930 is a story of amateurs and enthusiasts. Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff had no university affiliation, and Percival Lowell, who took on the quest for “Planet X”, had no formal astronomy education. Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto, was a 24-year-old high school graduate and amateur astronomer from Streator IL and Burdett KS who was hired on the basis of some sketches he sent to Lowell Observatory. He spent hundreds of hours guiding a telescope as it took long exposure photos, and even more hundreds of hours examining those plates for a point of light that moved from night to night. His discovery earned him a scholarship to the University of Kansas to get his degrees in astronomy. It’s fitting that some of his ashes are aboard New Horizons and making their way to Pluto for all of us.

John Heasley is an astronomy educator and stargazer who enjoys connecting people with the cosmos. He volunteers with NASA/JPL as a Solar System Ambassador. For more information about stargazing in southwest WI, like Driftless Stargazing LLC on Facebook and find out whenever there’s something awesome happening in the skies. Driftless Dark Skies appears monthly in the Voice of the River Valley.

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