Flagstaff, Arizona
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For no explainable practical reason, humans become obsessed with, and even empathize with, certain inanimate objects. our first car. Coffee mugs to choose from. And for certain subpopulations of the population, that range now extends to a dim frozen sphere 3.3 billion miles away.
Hundreds of them make the pilgrimage to Arizona for the I Heart Pluto Festival held each February. Flagstaff is where, nearly a century ago, telescope lenses captured what had been touted for decades as the solar system’s ninth planet.
Today, elementary school students are being taught that adding Pluto to their roster was a mistake. As it turns out, there are only eight proper planets, and Pluto belongs to the class of “dwarf planets” that exist as well.
But the demotion doesn’t stop believers from attending several days of lectures, pub crawls and birthday cakes.
“This is a story about love. It’s about people who love this subculture enough to have a festival,” Alan Stern told an audience of about 200 people on Valentine’s Day during a Pluto talk at the Orpheum Theater in Flagstaff. Stern is the principal investigator on the active New Horizons spacecraft, which flew by Pluto in 2015 and took close-up images of the planet. The results revealed that, contrary to the artist’s general idea of a moon-like sphere littered with meteors, its surface contained enormous glaciers and a vast heart-shaped region that glowed brightly with frozen nitrogen.
There is no such thing as an “I Heart Jupiter” festival on “I Heart Jupiter” or any other planet, Stern reminded the crowd.
Pluto also aroused feelings of exclusivity because it held the distinction of being the only planet discovered from the United States among the nine previously officially registered planets. The five planets closest to Earth, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, were all visible to the naked eye and were therefore known to ancient stargazers. Astronomers discovered Uranus in England in 1781 and Neptune in Germany 65 years later, but both are scientifically “unloved”, as evidenced by the lack of dedicated space missions sent to explore them.
Flagstaff’s Lowell Observatory made international headlines in February 1930 when astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovered “Planet 9” in the distance from a telescope still located on the site. Pluto was such a cultural phenomenon at the time that Walt Disney named Mickey’s only pet after him in 1931. Pluto then became established for generations as the punctuation mark at the end of a planetary roll call, a rocky little oddity appearing on the other side of the gas giants that completed the set.
But in 2006, Pluto was back in the headlines when the Paris-based International Astronomical Union (IAU) redefined the term “planet” by removing it from the official canon.
This relegation remains a source of sadness and camaraderie for the Fanatics. When Stoker Stoker, the observatory’s dark-sky planetarium specialist, mentioned Pluto’s reclassification in his remarks to the Orpheum crowd, there were cries of “Bullshit!” Laughter continued to echo through the cave-like space. Stoker quickly added, “We don’t really like that here in Flagstaff.”
If you’re a rebel or just nostalgic, you can buy a pro-Pluto mug in the observatory’s gift shop that says, “In my time there were nine planets.” If you want to get technical, and festival goers do too, no one tells people that our sun is a dwarf sun, but this doesn’t count as a star.
Heading into the I Heart Pluto Festival, I expected a gathering of quirky contrarians focused on the weird and unusual. But I didn’t find them oddballs, I found them crazy in the coolest sense of the word. People come together for an earnest celebration of local pride, scientific discovery, and American history.
That being said, if you want to show your colors, there are things like Pluto in gangster signs. Raise your hands and bend one thumb to show your allegiance to the number 9.
“Humans are kind of funny,” Stoker told the crowd. “Despite our abnormally large brains, we tend to listen to our hearts. And we, on the contrary, have a very strong sense of fairness… We love the underdog. So it’s no surprise to me that when Pluto seemed to be disrespected by some in the scientific community, people who love these things cried out. It’s a very human thing to want to celebrate Pluto’s legacy.”
Eddie Gonzalez, 46, a satellite equipment seller from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, wore a red baseball cap emblazoned with the familiar font that read “PLUTO AMERICAS PLANET AGAIN.” He had come to the festival in hopes of transferring one of several domain names he had purchased to commemorate the discovery of Pluto to a more official institution. For example, his clydetombaugh.com contains biographical information about the astronomer. Another site, papa2026.com, blames Pluto’s loss of status on an “unelected international committee” and invites visitors to “join our campaign to make Pluto an American planet again.”
Arizona is known as a rebellious state (see the state’s track record on daylight saving time), and Congress declared Pluto a state planet in 2024, nearly 20 years after the IAU determined that Pluto was ineligible for planetary status. State Rep. Justin Wilmes, who proudly introduced and passed the bill, addressed attendees wearing a purple T-shirt with a travel poster image of a downhill astronaut labeled “Ski Pluto.”
But the festival’s pro-Pluto stance isn’t as fraudulent as it might seem. The scientific community is also somewhat rebellious about Pluto’s status. Stern told me that when scientists at the University of Central Florida analyzed 18,000 papers on planetary science published in the 15 years or so starting in 2006 (the year the IAU stripped Pluto of its title), not a single paper used the IAU’s definition of a “dwarf planet,” a “laughing term for a planet.”
A trio of septuagenarian friends, Eileen Hart, Sharon Halfnight and Rich Ryan (the latter two from Canada) excitedly chatted with each other during the event’s Pluto extravaganza. Astrology buff Halfnight pointed out that the fact that Pluto takes about 250 years to orbit the sun means that today Pluto is basically back to where it was when America was fighting for its independence, a harbinger of the coming revolution. After all, Pluto and “rich politics” (rule by the rich) share an etymology, which should serve as a reminder to all of us of the potential for abuse of power, Halfnight added.
Meanwhile, Hart expected “young hippies” like those in Flagstaff’s many coffee shops and breweries to stand up to the bureaucracy that stole Pluto’s identity.
Ryan said he lives in a dark-sky area called Cortez Island, about 290 miles north of British Columbia’s capital Victoria. Even in Flagstaff, he was in touch with the visible universe. Anti-light pollution organization DarkSky International first recognized the city as an International DarkSky City in 2001.
Darkness is a point of civic pride. Private houses and cities are also participating in this initiative, which is why the streets at night are illuminated with the orange glow of special LED street lights. To take advantage of this initiative, Lowell Observatory has an outdoor planetarium on its roof, where visitors can gaze at the night sky from heated reclining seats.
The night before the talk at the Orpheum, a Pluto-themed pub crawl featuring interstellar-themed cocktails and beers was held, and the day after Valentine’s Day, a series of science presentations were held at the observatory. The festival ended with more than 500 Pluto enthusiasts joining in on the birthday celebration, singing “Happy Birthday” over a cake featuring the string-eyed alien cartoon mascot Pluo. Visitors could also climb the stairs to the original hilltop observatory tower, where the telescope Klingbaugh used to find Pluto is still located.
Loving Pluto is also loving Flagstaff. Flagstaff is a charming town full of college students and older hippies, with old brick buildings and cozy gathering spaces, surrounded by mountain peaks and outdoor recreation. It is also the gateway to the Grand Canyon.
The city is bisected by another symbol of American progress and achievement, once admired but now downgraded: the road now known as Historic Route 66. Like regular Route 66, it was the backbone of the federal highway system that ran from Chicago to Los Angeles. John Steinbeck called it the “Mother Lode” in “The Grapes of Wrath.” It was officially retired in 1985, replaced by the Interstate Highway System.
Spoken word poet Christopher Fox Graham, one of the festival’s speakers, connected the town, the road, and the earth in a poem titled “Per Aspera ad Astra,” which in Latin means “Over the Difficulties to the Stars.” He read part of it like this:
Route 66 transported engineers and theorists.
mathematicians and mechanics,
engineers and astronauts,
Telescope and rocket parts, jet fuel and dreamer
Personally, I have come to love Flagstaff as a therapy for overcoming hardships. Thirty years ago, when I was fresh out of college and working at a Phoenix middle school for Teach for America, I would blow off work stress by driving 150 miles to Flagstaff on weekends to ski and forming fleeting friendships at local bars.
During my first visit to Lowell Observatory at the time, the staff was eager to help me think of a romantic gesture for my girlfriend on the East Coast. I wanted to find a reference point to share each night to bridge the distance. Three excited employees then debated whether it should be Venus, the love theme, or Sirius, the dog planet. We chose the latter because it is the brightest star in the night sky, the object of navigation and a symbol of devotion alongside his faithful companion Orion.
I never thought much about Pluto. I didn’t shed a tear when I was randomly stripped of my title. Science was science. Before leaving town on this visit, we made one last stop at Mother Lode Brewing Company. Considering it was a Sunday night and it was packed, I assumed I was surrounded by die-hard Pluto fans.
While drinking Ad Astra, a double IPA dedicated to the small planet that is possible, I once again explored my feelings. The cold, small world didn’t have enough mass to clear its orbit, but it pulled all these people together with the gravity of what it represented: science. expedition. Ingenuity. Fraudulent. rotate. Viva la pluto!
