“The New Horizon” by Christopher Fox Graham

I performed two poems at Lowell Observatory's annual I ❤ Pluto Festival Saturday, Feb. 15, at the Orpheum Theatre. The featured guests were Adam Nimoy, a television director and son of the late actor Leonard Nimoy; Alan Stern, Ph.D., Principal Investigator of the New Horizons Mission to Pluto; comet-hunter David Levy, who co-discovered Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 (D/1993 F2) with Flagstaff scientists Gene and Carolyn Shoemaker.

This was the first of the two poems I wrote for the event. It pairs as a trilogy with my 2012 poem "Dear Pluto" about the planet and my 2016 poem "Clyde Tombaugh" about the planet's discoverer, who first viewed the planet from Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff.

Dr. Alan Stern emailed me after the I ❤ Pluto Festival:

"Dear Christopher,

Thanks a bunch for these, they are wonderful pieces of art and I am grateful for you sending them so I can share in our team.

Hope to see you again in Flag someday (and hopefully before Pluto’s 100th)!

Very best,

-Alan"

“The New Horizon”

by Christopher Fox Graham

amid the infinite dark

400 billion points of light burn —

93 million miles from one unremarkably ordinary star,

the first snap-crack of amino acids

move and grow, 

seeking something beyond 

the first horizon 

of its salt pond tide pool

the drive to expand, experience, explore

written at inception into RNA

the hero’s journey inscribed in all cells since

we’re here, now, because “here” wasn’t enough

our ancestors sought what’s over next horizon

the first fish to set foot on land 

the first therapsid to walk upright

the first mammal to emerge in the shadow of the last dinosaur

the first primate to step onto the savannah

the first human family to leave the only tribe 

to start a new one

the first caravan to cross the desert

the first ship to leave the safety of shore

the first astronaut to lose sight of the Earth

beyond the edge of the dark side of the Moon

mystery, adventure, fate, fortune and future

are always over the hopeful horizon 

"Earthrise," taken on Dec. 24, 1968, by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders

this here, this sphere of home, 

this pale blue dot suspended in a sunbeam

is all we know, every human being who ever was, 

every hunter, forager, peasant, king, inventor, explorer, 

"superstar", "supreme leader," hero, coward, 

dreamer, destroyer, saint, sinner, genocide and miracle

every mother and father, broken heart and forever love story,

every living thing 

from that first cell

to your hopeful child

is here, 

on this grain of sand in the dark

the breadth of my palm from our singular sun

"The Pale Blue Dot"

but out there are more worlds with unseen horizons

so we peer into the dark

unafraid of what we may find 

cast out our messages in bottles

to send photos of the spheres 

and their untouched horizons back home

so we can wonder at their beauty

but out along the edge

beyond our brother Mars,

the great Jupiter 

and ringed Saturn

fraternal twins Neptune and Uranus

is the ninth horizon

discovered by a Kanas boy 

who called Flagstaff home

Clyde Tombaugh [Feb. 4, 1906-Jan. 17, 1997]

that far out, the sun that made life possible here

is a point of light,

but barely much more

though it holds Pluto in orbit like a prodigal son

astronomers-turned-archers 

sent New Horizons to see Clyde Tombaugh’s discovery —

we sent a piece of him, too

his ashes in a capsule 

no bigger 

than a thumb

132524 APL (2002 JF56)

it waved hello to asteroid 132524 APL,

swam through the swirling orbits of Jupiter’s 95 moons

like a sober freshman navigating a nightclub dance floor

with a sweaty fake ID, 

hoping not to be noticed,

popping paparazzi photos 

of Io, Ganymede, Callisto and Europa

Galilean moons Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto

then, hooked by the weight, 

turned left, 

passing the orbits of the outer planets

to the final horizon

to this 

mote of dust

New Horizons passes through the Pluto system at about 30,800 mph, passing within 40,000 miles of Pluto on Monday, July 13, 2015.

in the blink of an eye

Robin Hood could loose an arrow into a bullseye

and send a second

to split the first at a 100 paces

but teams of technicians on earth

could split the orbit

of Pluto and Charon

at 30,000 miles per hour

from 2 billion miles away 

closer than Nix, Kerberos, Hydra and Styx

had ever been

We named everything — 

maculae after the gods of death 

who rule permanent horizons 

Cadejo, Meng Po and Morgoth

fluctus after those 

who journeyed to the underworlds 

of a dozen mythologies,

Mpobe, Dioynsus, Xanthius

plains after satellites 

Sputnik, Rosetta, and Ranger, Chandrayaan, Hiten and Yutu 

who broke the bonds of earth,

for the dreamers uncontent to be held back by the old horizons

we named the hills and mountains 

Edmund Hillary, Tenzing Norgay, 

Zheng He, Bessie Coleman, Muhammad al-Idrisi,
Junko Tabei, Juan Sebastián Elcano,
Thor Heyerdahl and the Wright brothers

craters and regions after those 

who stared into the abyss

Percival Lowell, Viktor Safronov, Michael Belton

free from nationality, 

all sharing a singular horizon

we saved the welcoming heart 

for Tombaugh

the boy whose heart
kept New Horizons warm in the dark

warm, and fundamentally human

because “here” was never enough

beyond Pluto

we sought one last horizon at Arrokoth 

the "Ultima Thule" on our map

Arrokoth, informally known as Ulitma Thule.

now 4.6 billion miles from a lost horizon

it will never see again

is our message in a bottle

proof that “here” is never enough

for a cell or a species

our New Horizons are infinite

Departure shot of Pluto by New Horizons, showing Pluto's atmosphere backlit by the Sun. consists mainly of nitrogen, with minor amounts of methane and carbon monoxide. The blue color is close to what a human eye would have seen, and is caused by layers of haze in the atmosphere 

Notes:

"Earthrise" was taken on Dec. 24, 1968, by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders at 16:39:39.3 UTC. The Apollo 8 crew consisted of Anders, Frank Borman and James Lovell. Using photo mosaics and elevation data from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, this video commemorates the 45th anniversary of Apollo 8's historic flight by recreating the moment when the crew first saw and photographed the Earth rising from behind the Moon. Narrator Andrew Chaikin, author of A Man on the Moon, sets the scene for a three-minute visualization of the view from both inside and outside the spacecraft accompanied by the onboard audio of the astronauts:

Anders used a highly modified Hasselblad 500 EL camera with an electric drive. The camera had a simple sighting ring, rather than the standard reflex viewfinder, and was loaded with a 70 mm film magazine containing custom Ektachrome film developed by Kodak. Anders had been photographing the lunar surface with a 250 mm lens; the lens was subsequently used for the Earthrise images. While the image is best known with the moon horizon on the bottom of the image and the Earth rising above, it was actually shot as it appears here, in line with the lunar north pole. It was later rotated 95 degrees to place the moon horizon at the bottom of the photo.

"The Pale Blue Dot" is a photograph of Earth taken Feb. 14, 1990, by NASA’s Voyager 1 at a distance of 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from the Sun. The image inspired the title of scientist Carl Sagan's book, "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space," in which he wrote: "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam," which is sampled and paraphrased in the poem.

132524 APL (2002 JF56): The two "spots" in this image are two images of asteroid 132524 APL (2002 JF56) taken on June 11, bottom, at a distance of 3.36 million kilometers, and June 12, 2006, the top, taken at 1.34 million kilometers. The asteroid is about 2.5 kilometers in diameter.

Galilean Moons: The montage of Jupiter's four large and diverse Galilean satellites as seen by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager on the New Horizons spacecraft during its flyby of Jupiter in late February 2007. The four moons are, from left to right: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. The images have been scaled to represent the true relative sizes of the four moons and are arranged in their order from Jupiter.

Robin Hood: If the 4.8 billion-kilometer distance to Pluto when New Horizons passed through was reduced to 100 paces (200 to 400 feet depending on stride, or ~100 yards, i.e., the length of a football field), the 40,000-mile (64,373 km) distance between Pluto and New Horizons when it passed within 40,000 miles would be 1.22 millimeters. On that scale, the 2.7-meter New Horizons probe would be 2 nanometers, smaller than the diameter of a strand of DNA.

486958 Arrokoth: (2014 MU69) or Ultima Thule is a trans-Neptunian Kuiper belt object. Arrokoth became the farthest and most primitive object in the Solar System visited by a spacecraft whenNew Horizons conducted a flyby on Jan. 1, 2019. It is made of two lobes, a smaller "walnut" and a larger "pancake." The two conjoined lobes indicate Arrokoth used to be two separate bodies that stuck together after a gentle, slow-speed collision. The Latin "Ultima Thule" means "farthest Thule," a semi-mythical place in Greek and Roman mythology located in the far north, usually an island, possibly Iceland, the British Isles, the Shetland Isles or the Orkney Islands.