[X] My Assistant

[elakdawalla]

I don't suppose anyone has an old cached version of the Photojournal home page graphic lying around anywhere, do you? I noticed when I checked Photojournal's new images today that among the new images is this one:

PIA10231: Photojournal Home Page Graphic 2007

It contains eight planets only, no sign of Pluto -- I assume the graphic that this one replaced did contain it, but of course I don't have a copy anymore.

Just for grins, I tried to hunt down images of Pluto using the menus and links now available on the Photojournal home page and I couldn't do it. Pluto is not available from the dropdown in Small Bodies searches, nor is it available from the dropdown in the Universe category (even though 2003 UB313 is). Google turns up what was once the index page available through the link on the home page graphic (Images of Pluto and All Available Satellites). Someone needs to figure out how to help people find Pluto pictures!

--Emily

[tedstryk]

But this is about that debate, when it comes down to the bottom line.

Actually, no it isn't. It is about navigability. It is about navigability, and small bodies, placed in the lower left with a picture of a comet, is not where a novice would think to look for Pluto and not a fitting category that leads to it being easy to find. I have other serious problems with the the photojournal setup, such as the fact that if there are a lot of images in a category, you have to plod through 10 at a time after the first 100. The current format, while it now has spiffier graphics than it originally did, has followed the same basic format since 1998, a format that worked well at the time and continues to work well for targets with limited coverage. But for targets like Mars, it has become way to big for the current setup.

Another interesting note. The original 1998 graphic didn't have Pluto, probably owing to the lack of good pictures for the graphic and the lack of any pictures of Pluto on the original photojournal.



We are also cautioned, "For the near future, to properly interact with the Photojournal, you will need at least Netscape version 1.1N. We are planning on implementing a similar interface for other browsers. ;-)"

[JRehling]

Putting a link for Pluto similar to that of Neptune, etc., is not an explicit statement as to Pluto is a planet or not. It's just saying "here are Pluto images, and we believe that Pluto is one of the things people want to navigate to". It would be a debate in semiotics as to how much that is a statement of what class of world Pluto is. But I've seen plenty of astronomy resources (print and web) list the Sun and the Moon in a parallel manner to the planets. Nobody's claiming that the Sun is a planet but it still has a link from the Photojournal site. I'd like to know if the Sun got more clicks than Pluto during the time Pluto was on there. I would certainly bet that Pluto beat some of the planets out.

But beyond that, there was never a reason why anyone was compelled to agree with an IAU ruling. If a council of musicians dictates that Miles Davis did not play jazz, I am not compelled to agree with them. Nor am I compelled to agree with the IAU, even if the vote had been unanimous, which it obviously was not.

It's of course useful to have catalog names for the various dim stars and the smaller craters on the Moon, so people can have some means to communicate on the matter. The labeling of Pluto serves no such use; it's mere pedantry, and it's going to remain controversial for a long time, and will quite possibly be reversed. I think it would be reasonable (for two reasons I've listed here) to give planet-like links to Pluto and perhaps Eris. Taking the Pluto link away had the foolish result of indicating that something had somehow changed in a real way after the IAU ruling. Now if an impact shattered Pluto into many small pieces, I might be inclined to agree. But a label applied by a vote does not translate into executive action.

[Del Palmer]

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