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"
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
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
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.
