The Bears' Famous Invasion of Sicily

The only real network of telescopes that scans the skies has been designed and built by the military.БЂ«We have been spoiled by artistsБЂ™ renderings into imagining a clarity of resolution that doesnБЂ™t exist in actual astronomy. Pluto in ChristyБЂ™s photograph is faint and fuzzy-a piece of cosmic lint-and its moon is not the romantically backlit, crisply delineated companion orb you would get in a National Geographic painting, but rather just a tiny and extremely indistinct hint of additional fuzziness. Such was the fuzziness, in fact, that it took seven years for anyone to spot the moon again and thus independently confirm its existence. One nice touch about ChristyБЂ™s discovery was that it happened in Flagstaff, for it was there in 1930 that Pluto had been found in the first place. That seminal event in astronomy was largely to the credit of the astronomer Percival Lowell. Lowell, who came from one of the oldest and wealthiest Boston families (the one in the famous ditty about Boston being the home of the bean and the cod, where Lowells spoke only to Cabots, while Cabots spoke only to God), endowed the famous observatory that bears his name, but is most indelibly remembered for his belief that Mars was covered with canals built by industrious Martians for purposes of conveying water from polar regions to the dry but productive lands nearer the equator ...»