Several friends have asked that I post some of my astrophotographs to the web, so I’ve added a section to the website to do just that. I’ll also probably add occasional blog posts on what works and doesn’t work about my photography of the night skies.

Bear in mind that I’m still pretty new at this and am refining my techniques, so most of these images are flawed in one way or another. But I’m learning.

Since such formulae are confusing when the symbols “93” and “94” are used, we have decided to use symbols of the conventional chemical type to designate these elements. Following McMillan, who has suggested the name neptunium [...] for element 93, we are using plutonium [...] for element 94. The corresponding chemical symbols would be Np and Pu.¹

The dwarf planet Pluto was discovered on 13 March 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. The name Pluto, after the Roman god of the underworld, was suggested by British schoolgirl Venetia Burney. Burney’s grandfather, a former librarian at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, passed his granddaughter’s suggestion on to an astronomer colleague, who in turn cabled it to the Lowell Observatory. The staff at the Lowell voted to adopt Pluto as the name on 24 March.² The name was also considered a tribute to Percival Lowell, whose initials are the first two letters of the name. The 23 March 1930 New York Times quotes Charles Freeman, superintendent of the US Naval Observatory:

The new body is doubtless “Lowell’s planet,” as Uranus was “Herschel’s planet,” but it will be quite impossible to have the world at large accept Lowell as a lasting name any more than to attach the name Leverrier to Neptune was successful.

That same article is also the first published use of Pluto as a (then potential) name for the dwarf planet, but suggests that it would not be officially adopted:

Pluto is the prototype of Satan in many minds, and drops out for that reason perhaps.³

Later, the Times reported the official naming:

[Roger Lowell] Putnam added that Pluto lent itself easily to the monogram “P.L.,” the initials of Percival Lowell, and “would be a fitting memorial to him.”⁴

¹Oxford English Dictionary, plutonium, 3rd Edition, December 2008, Oxford University Press, accessed 20 November 2009, http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50182118.

²”Venetia Phair Dies at 90; as a Girl, She Named Pluto,” The New York Times, 10 May 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/11/world/europe/11phair.html.

³”Naval Observatory Films New Planet,” The New York Times, 23 March 1930, p. 27.

⁴”Pluto Picked as the Name for New Planet X,” The New York Times, 26 May 1930, p. 1.

The uranium outpost was passed some years ago by Prof. Enrico Fermi [...] with his discovery of the radioactive element No. 93, now called neptunium.¹

(In 1934, Fermi had thought he had produced element 93, but was mistaken. This 1941 article erroneously gives him credit.)

The chemical symbol for neptunium is Np.

¹Oxford English Dictionary, neptunium, 3rd Edition, December 2008, Oxford University Press, accessed 19 November 2009, http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/00323196. 

Uranium, a fossil found [...] in Saxony, and [...] in Bohemia, and is, by the miners, called Pechblend.¹

Pitchblende, the name for uranium oxide ore, is from the German pechblende, which is a compound of pech, or pitch, + blende. The ore is black and resembles pitch or tar. Blende is zinc sulphide, an ore which resembles galena, but is worthless as it contains no lead. The name is also applied to various other (supposedly) worthless ores, like pitchblende, and is from the German verb blenden, to deceive.² Some mistakenly take the first element to be from the German sense of pech meaning bad luck, due to the ore’s absence of silver, but this sense isn’t attested to until later. The German pechblende dates to at least 1720; English use of pitchblende dates to at least 1770.³

The planet Uranus, for which the element is named, was discovered in 1781 by English astronomer William Herschel, who named his discovery the Georgium sidus, the Georgian planet, after King George III. Needless to say, this name was not popular outside of Britain, and German astronomer Johann Elert Bode suggested the name Uranus, which followed the tradition of planetary names from classical myth. The name is particularly apt because Uranus is the planet after Saturn, and in myth Uranus is the father of the Titan Saturn. English use of Bode’s name dates to at least 1802, when it appears in Olinthus Gregory’s Treatise on Astronomy:

By some astronomers it is called Herschel, in honour of the discoverer; though among almost all foreigners, it has acquired the name of uranius [sic], which it is likely to retain.⁴

¹Oxford English Dictionary, uranium, 2nd Edition, 1989, Oxford University Press, accessed 18 November 2009, http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50273558.

²Oxford English Dictionary, blende, 2nd Edition, 1989, Oxford University Press, accessed 18 November 2009, http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50023473.

³Oxford English Dictionary, pitchblende, 3rd Edition, September 2009, Oxford University Press, accessed 18 November 2009, http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50180241.

⁴Oxford English Dictionary, Uranus, 2nd Edition, 1989, Oxford University Press, accessed 18 November 2009, http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50273577. 

I’ve never understood why this is a bad thing. To be sure, many small, independent bookstores have their charms and are pleasant places to visit and browse for books and their staff generally is more knowledgeable than that of big chains, but by their nature they have limited inventory. The competition that is killing them has far superior selection and makes available a much wider range of books at lower prices. The independent bookstore is more attractive as an ineffable ideal than as a cold, commercial reality. The reality is that more and better books are available to more people at lower prices than ever in history. You no longer have to live in Manhattan or San Francisco to find great books. The guy in the cabin with a DSL line in Elkbutt, Montana has as much access to books as the Fifth Avenue socialite.

Then the inimitable Clay Shirky comes along and summarizes the situation and puts forward a potential solution, a vision of what the independent bookstore could become. It is well worth a read.

In English use, the name was sometimes modified to protoactinium, using the prefix proto- instead of pro-, probably out of confusion over the extra t. Both versions of the name were in use in the first half of the 20th century, as evidenced by the following citations, the first from the 1918 Journal of the Chemical Society:

Assuming that 8% of the uranium atoms disintegrating produce “protoactinium,” the quantity in the 73 mg. is that in equilibrium with 86 grams of uranium.

And this from Chemical Abstracts of 1919:

Protactinium is one of the 5 new radioactive elements occupying a place in the periodic table hitherto vacant.

The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) declared protactinium to be the standard spelling in 1949.¹

The chemical symbol of protactinium is Pa.

¹Oxford English Dictionary, protactinium, 3rd Edition, December 2007, Oxford University Press, accessed 17 November 2009, http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50190628. 

But this wasn’t the first time that Berzelius named a substance for the god. In 1815 he called a compound, which turned out to be yttrium phosphate, thorjord, or Thor’s earth. The French flubbed the Swedish name, dubbing the compound thorine in their language, from which English took the name thorina (which is no longer in use.)²

To further confuse matters, for a time British chemists gave the name thorinum to the hypothetical element of which Berzelius’s thorjord was the oxide. And following Berzelius’s 1828 discovery of the real element thorium, some French and British took to calling that thorinum too. Fortunately, this state of affairs was confined to the 19th century and the name thorium is the only one still in use.³ This type of situation is fairly common in scientific nomenclature. With new discoveries, knowledge is very tentative and uncertain, and sometimes a number of terms come into use for a period to denote both real and hypothetical objects and concepts. As knowledge and scientific certainty grows, the nomenclature settles down to generally accepted and long-lasting terms.

¹Oxford English Dictionary, thorium, 2nd Edition, 1989, Oxford University Press, accessed 16 November 2009, http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50251414.

²Oxford English Dictionary, thorina, 2nd Edition, 1989, Oxford University Press, accessed 16 November 2009, http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50251409.

³Oxford English Dictionary, thorinum, 2nd Edition, 1989, Oxford University Press, accessed 16 November 2009, http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50251411. 

Of course, we do a words of the year thing here too, but it’s a bit less formal. I don’t select a single word, but rather use the opportunity to learn about and generate discussion on new words and phrases that are out there. So post your suggestions here.

The American Dialect Society is collecting suggestions for their selection of word of the year and word of the decade. (The selection will be in early January, as it should be.) You can send them directly to woty AT americandialect.org. I’ll also be sending the best ones posted here to Grant Barrett and the nominating committee. 

¹Oxford English Dictionary, actinium, 2nd Edition, 1989, Oxford University Press, accessed 15 November 2009, http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50002167.