Now that I think of it, that could be a very misleading headline. As far as I know, skunks and bears, or combinations thereof have not been discovered on Pluto. And certainly Ray Bradbury has never been there himself.

But hey, there’s a lot of ice! Mountains, snow packs, and yeah, it looks to be a planet, so maybe they will redact that old dwarf planet status. In fact, it looks like it may be a double planet, since it seems to be rotating along with its moon Charon around a point in space, rather than the moon rotating around Pluto.

It looks pretty cool and the experts according to NPR and other sources seem to say that it’s more complex a place than they thought it would be, that cold distant, North-America-sized ball out there. New Horizons was launched in 2006, and what we are seeing now is just beautiful.

I am sitting down to do some writing and editing tonight, but since I don’t have a poem for the occasion, I thought I’d share “If Only We Had Been Taller,” by Ray Bradbury, via this production from NPR’s Skunk Bear.

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