New Horizons, a space probe launched in 2005, nears Pluto and its moons.  I get excited whenever a world is about to be seen up close for the first time.  Other planets, asteroids, comets, moons, are real places, ancient in the billions of years, like Earth.  They are nature in the raw, as is the black vacuum of space.  No human has yet seen details of Pluto's features, but sixteen days from this writing the remote object and its moons, will spread through humanity's information storage and retrieval systems, becoming a known, at least by sight, phenomenon.
     A few years back some astronomers decided to change Pluto's designation as a planet to "minor planet," along with Ceres, the largest asteroid.  This upset a lot of people, I think, because in school we were taught the layout of the Solar System: nine planets, including the little one way out there with the radically tilted orbit around the Sun.  It crosses inside the path of Neptune sometimes, making that blue gas giant temporarily the outermost planet.  After the Pluto designation decision, Neptune, eighth planet from the Sun, became outermost planet full time.
     Pluto's smallness played a role in its downgrade to "minor planet."  There are many moons in the Solar System larger than Pluto.  Still, before the downgrade, a moon of Pluto, Charon, had been discovered.  Years later, four more moons, much smaller than Charon, have been seen, named, and plotted.  Close views of these raw, natural little worlds and their "minor planet" are impending.  Could it be the astronomers who changed Pluto's status will have to rethink their views once the Plutonian System is revealed?
     It should be evident I'm with the Pluto-is-a-planet party.  Since I'm always proud of my nation's peaceful accomplishments, I'm pleased that an American, Clyde Tombaugh, discovered it in 1930.
The public backlash against downgrading Pluto's status struck well-known astronomer Neil DeGrasse Tyson as startling and even ridiculous.  What he and other like-minded astronomers didn't realize is that changing designations or names of things after the fact doesn't always work smoothly.
When your friend, call him Bill, decides to be known by a different name, Dirk, you and others who've known Bill as Bill will tend to have a hard time calling him Dirk.  Bill's new acquaintances, however, if he introduces himself as Dirk, will always know him by that name.  No one in my family and none of my old friends call me Vic.  Likewise, if you're taught that Pluto's a planet, you won't embrace a designation change. 
     This argument over terms, by me and by the astronomers who started it in the first place, will seem stupid once Pluto and its moons can be seen for what they are: beautiful, strange, cold, and mysterious worlds moving in their own rhythms for longer than the beginning of evolution of eyes to see them.

                                                                             Vic Neptune