Catherine Story

PYLON.

Title notes:

Planet X was the name given to the idea of a new planet by Percival Lowell. In 1894 he built an observatory at the top of a hill in Flagstaff, Arizona, determined to find a ninth planet. He died in 1916, unaware that his telescope had captured two faint images of Pluto the year before. In 1929 Clyde Tombaugh came to Lowell from a farm in Kansas and started using a ‘blink comparator’ to examine images of the sky taken two weeks apart. He noticed a faint moving object in January 1930, and soon there was a competition to name it. A thousand entries were received from around the world. Eleven-year-old Venetia Burney from Oxford suggested “Pluto” (another name for Hades). It won every vote and she was rewarded five pounds. The mass of Pluto was recalculated downwards throughout the 20th century until it was 0.24 percent that of Earth. In 2006 the International Astronomical Union created a new definition for the term “planet” and Pluto was removed from the Solar System.

Mooncrete is a hypothetical building material for the Moon. It is made from lunar rock, water and concrete, so production partly depends on finding enough water.

Sandal is from the 1923 poem Euclid Alone by Edna St. Vincent Millais. It describes how the Greek mathematician is the only person to have seen beauty, while a few others have heard the sound of her footsteps on stone.

Apollo 8 was the first manned spaceflight to leave Earth’s gravity and go behind the Moon. The three-man crew left on December 21st 1968 and made a television broadcast on Christmas Eve. They read the story of creation from the book of Genesis and sent images of Earth hanging in the blackness of space. At the time it was the most watched television programme ever. Apple (1909) is a small plaster sculpture by Picasso. He gave the fruit that he claimed to have worked from to collector Vincenc Kramar, who preserved the shrivelled core until he died.

The Bluebird is a small bird from America that is either bright blue, or blue and red. It is a common symbol of happiness and optimism, as well as being a traditional tattoo for sailors after each 5,000 miles logged at sea.

Station is the wooden model that symbolises the building of a new town in Sergio Leone’s 1968 film, Once Upon a Time in the West.

The Dire wolf was a large wolf that lived in North America for 1.7 million years, (until about 11,000 years ago). It evolved alongside the coyote, or prairie fox, which has survived.