The forces of rotation caused red hot masses of stones to be torn away from the Earth and to be thrown into the ether, and this is the origin of the stars.

— Anaxagoras 428 BC

Pluto Charon

Pluto Charon

A composite of 13x13 arcsec wide images taken with the adaptive optics camera NACO on Yepun, one of the Unit Telescopes of ESO's VLT (Paranal). The images were taken in the K-band (2.2 microns) from about three hours to about one hour before the occultation. All images were centered on Pluto and Charon, the double object visible near the center, with a separation of about 0.9 arcsec. Because of the system's motion, the occulted star, at the right of Pluto and Charon, appears as a dotted trail, and so does another star in the lower left corner.