‘What about the moon Tracey?’ asked my husband facetiously when an astronomer on the wireless, talking of Pluto’s moon Charon, pronounced it ‘Sharon’. As usual, things turn out not to be so simple as my husband’s understanding of them.
Everyone knows that Pluto was named in 1930 by an 11-year-old girl, Venetia Burney. Her mother, the sister of the quirky belletrist Geoffrey Madan, was the daughter of Falconer Madan, Bodley’s Librarian. Madan mentioned the discovery of the new planet to his granddaughter, who came up with the name Pluto, god of the underworld, which Falconer Madan mentioned to the Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford, who cabled the Lowell Observatory in Arizona. Clyde Tombaugh liked the name, partly for the weak reason that it incorporated the initial and start of the name of his patron Percival Lowell.
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