NASA | Charon at 40: The Discovery of Pluto’s Largest Moon

The largest of Pluto’s five moons, Charon, was discovered on June 22, 1978, by James Christy and Robert Harrington at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona.
Read the story: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/charon-at-40-four-decades-of-discovery-on-pluto-s-largest-moon
Charon was discovered only about six miles from where Pluto itself was discovered at Lowell Observatory. They weren’t even looking for satellites of Pluto – Christy, examining a series of grainy telescope images, trying to refine Pluto’s orbit around the Sun.

Christy and others tell the story of this amazing scientific find, which fueled Pluto’s transformation from a telescopic dot into an actual planetary system – and a source of many discoveries to come.

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