ob wnn: this is NOT the Disney Dawg....
> Newsgroups: alt.obituaries > Subject: Venetia Phair, 90; Named the Planet Pluto > Date: Thu, 7 May 2009 12:16:47 -0400 Schoolgirl who earned a footnote in the history of astronomy when she named the planet Pluto Photo (then): http://www.ias.as/weblog/uploaded_images/Venetia_phair-716809.jpg FROM: The London Daily Telegraph ~ Venetia Phair, who has died aged 90, had the distinction of being the only woman in the world to have named a planet; in 1930, as a girl of 11, she suggested the name Pluto for the enigmatic celestial body that had just been discovered, and which became (albeit only temporarily) the ninth planet in our solar system. On the morning of March 14 1930 she was having breakfast at the house in Oxford in which she lived with her grandfather, Falconer Madan, the retired Librarian at the Bodleian, when he drew her attention to an article in The Times which noted that the newly found frozen planet had yet to be named. Being keen on Greek and Roman myths, young Venetia suggested that Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld who could render himself invisible, would make a good name for the dark and remote world. The idea so impressed her grandfather that he immediately promised to put it to his friend Herbert Hall Turner, Professor of Astronomy at Oxford University. Turner was in London that day at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society, where the question of nomenclature was being anxiously discussed; once Madan had tracked him down, Turner agreed that "Pluto" was an excellent choice for the ice-covered world and undertook to forward it by telegram to the Lowell Observatory in Arizona. The astronomers there - including 24-year-old Clyde W Tombaugh, who had made the actual discovery - were delighted with Venetia's suggestion. For one thing, Pluto was one of the few big names in classical mythology that had not already been used. But, perhaps more persuasively, the first two letters were the initials of the observatory's founder, Percival Lowell, who had predicted the existence of a new heavenly body at the outer reaches of the solar system. Once Turner had cabled her suggestion to the American astronomers, Venetia heard nothing further for more than a month. At last, on May 1 1930, the name Pluto was formally adopted. As a reward, Madan gave Venetia a white £5 note - a considerable sum at the time. By coincidence, Venetia's great-uncle Henry Madan, a science master at Eton, had, in 1878, successfully suggested the names Phobos and Deimos for the moons of Mars. Venetia Katharine Douglas Burney was born on July 11 1918, the daughter of the Reverend Charles Fox Burney, Oriel Professor of Interpretation of Holy Scripture at Oxford, and his wife, Ethel Wordsworth Madan. Venetia's father died when she was six, and she went to live with her maternal grandparents in north Oxford. As a child she had joined in a game, in one of the university parks, which involved placing lumps of clay representing the planets in such a way as to show their respective distances from the Sun. This had whetted her interest in astronomy. Of her inspired moment, Venetia could clearly remember that breakfast in her grandfather's dining room, but recalled very little about the conversation. Even though he was retired, it was Falconer Madan's habit to visit the Bodleian Library regularly to pursue his interest in Lewis Carroll and to visit former colleagues. "He walked down to the Bodleian as usual," Venetia recalled, "and on the way he diverted sufficiently to drop a note in at Professor Turner's house." The £5 reward was typical of her grandfather's generosity, she said. She always treasured the press cuttings he had collected about her moment of fame, which proved more enduring than she suspected. In 1987 the asteroid 6235 Burney was named in her honour, as was a student-built instrument on board the New Horizons spacecraft during its mission to Pluto in 2006; the American space agency Nasa invited her to the launch at Cape Canaveral, but she declined on account of her age. A highly intelligent, self-effacing girl, Venetia was educated at Downe House, and read Mathematics at Newnham College, Cambridge. During the war she qualified as a chartered accountant, and in the late 1950s switched to teaching economics and maths, first at Gloucester House, Sutton, and later at Wallington county girls' school, Surrey, retiring in the mid-1980s. For the last 25 years Venetia Phair had been a volunteer with the Friends of Epsom Hospital. In 2006 Pluto was officially downgraded from planet to dwarf planet, causing much controversy in astronomical circles. "It's interesting that as they come to demote Pluto, so interest in it seems to have grown," Venetia Phair noted. Although largely indifferent to the debate, she confessed that she would have preferred it to have remained a planet. She was vexed by suggestions that she had named Pluto after the Disney cartoon dog, which also appeared in 1930 - but it was clear that the dog had been named after the planet, rather than the other way round. Venetia Phair, who died on April 30, married, in 1947, Maxwell Phair, a classicist who became a housemaster and head of English at Epsom College. He died in 2006, and she is survived by their son. --- Photo (recent): http://www.jfmto.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Venetia_Phair.jpg --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "World News Now Discussion List" group. 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