For those of us who grew up enchanted by books with glossy painted-to-look-like-photographs pictures of the planets and other celestial bodies, Pluto's demotion seems to have touched a live nerve. There must have been plenty of these - all with more or less the same, or similar, pictures. I think the book I had was The Golden Book of Astronomy. I poured over those pictures time after time, establishing almost a friendship with Jupiter's red spot, for instance. This was still considerably before telescopes could take high resolution photographs, or computers could render collected data into accurate photographs. The tools of astronomy were surprisingly primitive back then, but I never doubted the accuracy of those artist's renditions.

And I guess it's the memory of those books which make it hard for us to accept that Pluto is no longer a planet. There's certainly no lack of reaction on the web. Danny Sullivan, for instance, comments:

You don't call something a planet for nearly a century and then change your mind. Make an exception!

What did Pluto ever do to those science guys?