Dorothy’s not in Kansas any more – she’s in space

Dorothy Gale, of Wizard of Oz fame, has just been immortalised in the heavens.The International Astronomical Union, which names celestial objects and their surface features, has named a big crater on a remote moon after Dorothy.

Pluto, the most distant planet in the solar system, has five moons, of which Charon is the largest. An American module recently photographed this tiny moon, showing plenty of craters and steep chasms.

What names should we give these features? Astronomers have stepped out of line to give Charon’s surface features celebrity names that pay homage to the international spirit of human exploration, to fictional or mythological travellers, strange journeys, and mysterious destinations.

Among the new names are Nemo, captain of the submarine Nautilus in Jules Verne’s classic Twenty

Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Revati, an ancient time traveller in the Hindu epic

Mahabharata. Another is named after Sadko, who travelled to the bottom of the sea in a medieval Russian epic.

One chasm is named after Mandjet, one of the boats that carried the ancient Egyptian sun god across the sky, another after Argo, sailed by the Argonauts in Greek mythology, and Caleuche, a ghost ship that sails off the coast of Chile, collecting dead sailors who then live aboard forever.

One of Charon’s mountains is named after Stanley Kubrick, who directed the film 2001: A Space

Odyssey. Two others are named after science fiction writers Sir Arthur C Clarke and Octavia Butler.

The surface features of Pluto’s other four moons, Styx, Nix, Hydra and Kerberos are still un-named.

On Pluto itself are mountains named after Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. Other New Zealanders are dotted about the solar system.

One crater on Mars is named to honour Lord Ernest Rutherford, another is named Pickering, after three scientists with that name, including rocketeer Sir William Pickering. NZ painter Frances Hodgkins has a crater on Mercury.

Inexplicably, the Kiwi townships of Cave, Kumara, Loburn and Runanga have Martian craters named after them. Several asteroids have been named after Kiwi astronomers. In 2016, Auckland astronomer Jennie McCormack found a kilometre-long asteroid orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. She named it New Zealand.

The Kiwi townships of Cave, Kumara, Loburn and Runanga have Martian craters named after them.