"Astronomer" James W. Christy Hand Signed 2 Page TLS Dated 2012 For Sale

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"Astronomer" James W. Christy Hand Signed 2 Page TLS Dated 2012:
$199.99

Up for sale "Astronomer" James W. Christy Hand Signed 2 Page TLS dated 2012TLS.

ES-8629

James Walter "Jim" Christy (born September 15, 1938) is an American astronomer.

Christy was born in 1938 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He attended the University of Arizona and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in astronomy from

there in 1965.On June 22, 1978 while working at the United States Naval Observatory,

he discovered that Pluto

had a moon, which he named Charon

shortly afterwards. The name remained unofficial until its adoption by the IAU

in 1986.The discovery was made by carefully examining an enlargement of a

photographic plate of Pluto and noticing it had a very slight bulge on one

side. This plate and others had been marked "poor" because the

elongated image of Pluto was thought to be a defect resulting from improper

alignment. The 1965 plates included a note "Pluto image elongated",

but observatory astronomers, including Christy, assumed that the plates were

defective until 1978.However, Christy noticed that only Pluto was elongated—the

background stars were not. His earlier work at the Naval Observatory had

included photographing double stars, so it occurred to him that this bulge might

be a companion of Pluto. After examining images from observatory archives

dating back to 1965, he concluded that the bulge was indeed a moon. The

photographic evidence was considered convincing but not conclusive (it remained

possible that the bulge was due to Pluto having an unexpectedly irregular

shape). However, based on Charon's calculated orbit, a series of mutual eclipses

of Pluto and Charon was predicted and observed, confirming the discovery. In

more modern telescopes, such as the Hubble or ground-based telescopes using adaptive

optics, separate images of Pluto and Charon can be resolved, and the

New Horizons

probe took images showing some of Charon's surface features.In late 2008, the asteroid

129564

Christy was named in his honor.† As of 2015, he resides in Flagstaff, Arizona. He has been married to Charlene Mary since 1975 and has

four children. On July 14, 2015, he and Clyde

Tombaugh's children were guests at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics

Laboratory when the New Horizons

spacecraft successfully performed the first flyby of the Pluto-Charon system.Christy's

inspiration for the name "Charon" came about due to a personal

interest in naming the moon after his wife. He used her nickname,

"Char" for Charlene, and added -on (for his interest in physics in

protons and electrons, which have -on endings) to make Charon. It was only

later that he found the same name in mythology, that being the ferryman who

carried souls across the Acheron River, one of the five mythical rivers that

surrounded Pluto's underworld.

"Astronomer" James W. Christy Hand Signed 2 Page TLS Dated 2012

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