Sedona Red Rock News Managing Editor and Sedona Poetry Slam founder Christopher Fox Graham has become the second Sedona resident to have a celestial body named after him with the recent redesignation of asteroid 1999 (AQ23) as 29722 Chrisgraham by the International Astronomical Union.

“For the last several years, Fox has written and read poems at our I Heart Pluto Festival, and he’s really gone above and beyond helping out and being part of our program,” Lowell Observatory historian Kevin Schindler said. “We wanted to thank him in some unique way, and that’s a pretty unique way … One of the neat things about Lowell Observatory is that our site has discovered a lot of asteroids, and sometimes we can, for people who have done something special or staff who have been here for a while, our scientists can submit a name to the International Astronomical Union for unnamed asteroids.”

“Christopher Fox Graham [b. 1979] is an American journalist and longtime managing editor of Sedona Red Rock News. He is a nationally recognized slam poet who has written and performed multiple poems about Pluto and other space themes,” the IAU citation stated.

“The way it works is that people who observe asteroids measure their positions in the sky, and those positions get reported to a central clearinghouse called the Minor Planet Center, which is part of the IAU,” said Larry Wasserman, Ph.D., who is Lowell’s longest-serving astronomer. “If I take an exposure tonight at the telescope of some object, and in that exposure there are four or five other moving objects, which is not unusual, I will measure them all relative to their positions in the stars, send them all in … All the ones that are considered new are given what is known as a preliminary designation … Once it is determined well enough, which means it won’t get lost and never be seen again, it’s given a sequential number.

“Once it’s given the number, the discoverer is allowed to name it. 29722 was discovered by the LONEOS telescope, so the IAU Minor Planet Center has decided that Lowell Observatory is the official discover, and I have been designated as the person to communicate these names to the IAU.”

“It’s really very moving,” Graham said. “It’s the best thing astronomers can give a non-astronomer. They name things, so they can name something for me. A lot of the astronomers have told me, ‘I don’t like poetry, but I like your poetry,’ because it’s about something they’re interested in. They like the research I put into the poems. Larry Wasserman in particular told me last year, ‘I don’t like poetry, but I liked your poem.’”

“Kevin Schindler thought it would be — since Christopher has been very helpful with the I Heart Pluto Festival — thought it would be a nice thing to name one after Christopher,” Wasserman said. “So he wrote up a citation and provided that to me, and I sent in the proposed name to what is called the Working Group on Small Body Nomenclature, who actually approve names for the IAU. So they approved the name and sent us back a note saying, in effect, that name is approved. And once it’s approved you can tell the person you’ve named it for.”

After the festival on Feb. 15, Adam Nimoy, New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, Ph.D., and comet-hunter David Levy — who codiscovered the Shoemaker-Levy comet — held a book signing and all but Stern went to Lowell Observatory with some of the staff and volunteers to the Giovale Open Deck Observatory.

“It was a surprise,” Graham said of the asteroid’s unveiling. “On the way back through the parking lot, I was walking with David Levy … David Eicher, who’s the editor-in-chief of Astronomy magazine, Kevin and Rep. Justin Wilmeth from District 2 … Kevin said, ‘Oh, I have a surprise for you.’ I thought it was something minor like a T-shirt or something, and he walks over with a piece of paper and shows me my asteroid. I was very thankful and gave all those guys hugs and took a bunch of photos in the dark. It was very impromptu.”

Wasserman said the naming process took roughly one month and that 29722 was not chosen for any particular reason related to Graham.

“It was sort of just the next available one on the list. The LONEOS telescope has 20,000 asteroids it can name,” Wasserman said. “I probably have a hundred asteroids I could name personally, but I rarely go to the trouble.”

Schindler estimated that the observatory submits a couple of dozen names for asteroids each year. The first Sedonan to be inscribed among the stars was artist Delmary Rose Schanz, who was honored in 1981 by planetary scientist Schelte J. Bus with the naming of 3058 Delmary.

29722 Chrisgraham has a mildly eccentric orbit — which Graham noted was an appropriate attribute for an asteroid named after a poet — of 0.1238, with zero being a perfect circle and 1 being a parabolic orbit — a sidereal orbital period of 1,552 days and a somewhat atypical orbital inclination of 14.7 degrees. It was originally discovered on Jan. 14, 1999, by the Lowell Observatory Near-Earth-Object Search, which ran from 1993 to 2008, using a 24-inch Schmidt telescope on Anderson Mesa.

“You could potentially build some sort of colony or base on it, but because there are one and a half million asteroids in the main asteroid belt, it’s ultimately inconsequential compared to the rest that are larger,” Graham said of his asteroid, which is approximately three miles across. Its composition has not yet been determined.

“This asteroid will be about as close as it will get to the earth on May 9, 2025, when it will be 1.349 AU away,” Wasserman said. “This is about 125.5 million miles away. It will be about as bright as it gets, which is about 16th to 17th magnitude, which is relatively faint.” At least a 14-inch telescope would be required to resolve 29722 Chrisgraham.

“We have done that sometimes,” Schindler said with regard to the possibility of a watch party for named objects. “I’d love to do that with Fox because he has a special interest in astronomy. There’s no plan to do it, but I think it’s some thing that would be fun to do.”

“Slam poetry has only been around for about 40 years, and so there’s an object in the sky that’s going to be there for several hundred years until we mine it or something happens to it, maybe indefinitely, that’s always going to have my name on it, and anyone who comes across it and wants to know why it’s named what it’s named, they can see it’s named for some random guy in Sedona who does slam poetry and worked for a newspaper,” Graham said.

He is currently planning a poem on the asteroid, most likely for next year’s festival.

“I’ve been tracking it since the day I got it,” Graham said. “It’s just very inspirational to know that guys who study the stars and the planets and small bodies and celestial objects thought this would be something nice to give. They gave me something that they work with in the same way that I give them something I create through poetry. It’s just nice to know that whatever happens to me, that’s always going to be out there.”

Poems Graham has performed at the I ❤ Pluto Festival:

“The New Horizon”

For the technicians who worked on the New Horizons mission to Pluto

by Christopher Fox Graham
Feb. 15, 2025

amid the infinite dark
400 billion points of light burn —
93 million miles from one unremarkably ordinary star,
the first snap-crack of amino acids
move and grow,
seeking something beyond
the first horizon
of its salt pond tide pool

the drive to expand, experience, explore
written at inception into RNA
the hero’s journey inscribed in all cells since
we’re here, now, because “here” wasn’t enough

our ancestors sought what’s over next horizon
the first fish to set foot on land
the first therapsid to walk upright
the first mammal to emerge in the shadow of the last dinosaur
the first primate to step onto the savannah
the first human family to leave the only tribe
to start a new one
the first caravan to cross the desert
the first ship to leave the safety of shore
the first astronaut to lose sight of the Earth
beyond the edge of the dark side of the Moon
mystery, adventure, fate, fortune and future
are always over the hopeful horizon

this here, this sphere of home,
this pale blue dot suspended in a sunbeam
is all we know, every human being who ever was,
every hunter, forager, peasant, king, inventor, explorer,
“superstar”, “supreme leader,” hero, coward,
dreamer, destroyer, saint, sinner, genocide and miracle
every mother and father,
broken heart and forever love story,
every living thing
from that first cell
to your hopeful child
is here,
on this grain of sand in the dark
the breadth of my palm from our singular sun

but out there are more worlds with unseen horizons
so we peer into the dark
unafraid of what we may find
cast out our messages in bottles
to send photos of the spheres
and their untouched horizons back home
so we can wonder at their beauty

but out along the edge
beyond our brother Mars,
the great Jupiter
and ringed Saturn
fraternal twins Neptune and Uranus
is the ninth horizon
discovered by a Kanas boy
who called Flagstaff home

this far out, the sun that made life possible here
is a point of light,
but barely much more
though it holds Pluto in orbit like a prodigal son

astronomers-turned-archers
sent New Horizons to see Clyde Tombaugh’s discovery —
we sent a piece of him, too
his ashes in a capsule
no bigger than a thumb

it waved hello to asteroid 132524 APL,
swam through the swirling orbits of Jupiter’s 95 moons
like a sober freshman navigating a nightclub dance floor
with a sweaty fake ID, hoping not to be noticed,
popping paparazzi photos of Io, Ganymede, Callisto and Europa
then, hooked by the weight,
turned left, passing the orbits of the outer planets
to the final horizon
this mote of dust

in the blink of an eye
Robin Hood could loose an arrow into a bullseye
and send a second
to split the first at a 100 paces
but teams of technicians on earth
could split the orbit
of Pluto and Charon
at 30,000 miles per hour
from 2 billion miles away
closer than Nix, Kerberos, Hydra and Styx
had ever been

We named everything —
maculae after the gods of death who rule permanent horizons
Cadejo, Meng Po and Morgoth
fluctus after those who journeyed to the underworlds
of a dozen mythologies,
Mpobe, Dioynsus, Xanthius
plains after satellites
Sputnik, Rosetta, and Ranger, Chandrayaan, Hiten and Yutu
who broke the bonds of earth,

for the dreamers uncontent to be held back by the old horizons
we named the hills and mountains
Edmund Hillary, Tenzing Norgay,
Zheng He, Bessie Coleman, Muhammad al-Idrisi, Junko Tabei,
Juan Sebastián Elcano, Thor Heyerdahl and the Wright brothers
craters and regions after those who stared into the abyss
Percival Lowell, Viktor Safronov, Michael Belton
free from nationality, all sharing a singular horizon

we saved the welcoming heart
for Clyde Tombaugh
the boy whose heart kept New Horizons warm in the dark
warm, and fundamentally human

because “here” was never enough
beyond Pluto
we sought one last horizon at Arrokoth
the Ultima Thule on our map

now 4.6 billion miles from a lost horizon
it will never see again
is our message in a bottle
proof that “here” is never enough
for a cell or a species
our New Horizons are infinite

“The Most Human”

(with sincere apologies to Adam Nimoy)

by Christopher Fox Graham
Feb. 15, 2025

“Space: the final frontier”
urged us to look beyond this earth
upwards
to trek across the stars
to contemplate what’s beyond the event horizon
of Doomsday Machine black holes
wonder, awestruck at the Menagerie
of metronomic pulsars
of sapphire-amethyst nebulae
stretching across light years
to go where no man has gone before

Mercury, Gemini and Apollo brought men
to the edge of space and beyond
but before Armstrong set foot on the moon
we were already among the stars
as silent passengers aboard our
Enterprise

to shorten impossible distances,
we warped space itself
for the sake of plot
and beamed down to worlds
we will never reach
never see in our lifetime
on this side of the screen

the Red Scare
Japanese Internment camps
and Segregation weren’t yesterdays
but ancient history
sins forgiven, but never forgotten
the Enemy Within, a Balance of Terror
between human nature and our better angels
we Let That past Be Our Last Battlefield
understanding “without followers, evil cannot spread”
and formed a United Federation
of planets and crew

the future was now
and now was history,
Pavel Chekov navigated the course
Hikaru Sulu helmed the ship
Nyota Uhura spoke unsilenced for them all
Montgomery Scott could work miracles down below
amid redshirts
who deaths were never statistics
but revelations that danger
hides amid the stars

we could remain safe here
trapped on This Side of Paradise
in All Our Yesterdays
but this fragile starship Earth,
is a City on the Edge of Forever,
and the Devil is in the Dark
so we go boldly
to seek strange new worlds,
new life and new civilizations

ethos, pathos, logos commanding in trinity
James Kirk the spirit,
Bones McCoy the heart
and Spock the mind

passion and compassion
can’t survive long
with death outside the bulkheads
only cold Vulcan logic could rationalize
that the needs of the many
outweigh the needs of the few
or the one

Spock was too human to be Vulcan,
and too Vulcan to be human,
a exile son of two worlds
fully from neither
fully from both

with pointed ears that marked him as “other,”
Spock mirrored us to ourselves
wondered what made us human
questioned what we took for granted
pushed against illogical behaviors
we accept without question
“logic is the beginning of wisdom,
not the end”

the old Vulcan proverb says
“only Nixon could go to China”
and only Leonard Nimoy could be Spock

Mr. Nimoy,
you, too, were of two worlds
an exile son of the old
but a citizen of the new
fully from neither
but fully from both

your grandfather, the adventurer,
left behind the ghosts of the old nations
came to this America,
the mother of exiles
this safe shore for the tempest-tossed

your parents fled a shtetl in Russia
to escape pogroms and Cossack raids
your father, walking across the border to Poland
your mother, smuggled out in a hay wagon

you were born in Boston’s West End,
speaking Yiddish with your grandmother
keeping Kosher in a city of gentiles
with rough accents and strange customs
but a sky full of the same stars

they arrived as aliens,
and became citizens
you went to Hollywood
and became an alien
a bridge between past and present
telling tales from the future
not burdened by history
not bound to earth

you forged Spock,
making him more you than Roddenberry
maintaining character between shoots
the voice of reason
emotions restrained
logical, rational, distant from the chaos

you transformed a priestly blessing from synagogue
into the Vulcan salute
mainstreaming a childhood memory
of your orthodox upbringing
into the American melting pot
“Live Long and Prosper” a shibboleth
so we nerds and fans
Trekkies and Trekkers,
may know each other by it

you, Mr. Nimoy as Mr. Spock,
became a symbol for NASA and astronomers
who wore pointed ears to Star Trek conventions
after weeks studying the cosmos

when Spock fell at the Battle of the Mutara Nebula
his death shook two galaxies
sacrificing himself to save the ship and the crew
dying as he lived
his final words:
“I have been…
and always shall be…
your friend”
said to Kirk, but meant for all of us
you and Spock speaking as one

and you are our friend, Mr. Nimoy,
even if only met through the screen

Hollywood cast and Starfleet crew
brought Spock back,
McCoy lost his mind holding your katra
Kirk lost his son, his ship, his command
the crew destroyed a planet
destroyed the Enterprise
“Because the needs of the one… “
“outweigh the needs of the many”
and your fascinating story was not yet over
neither in time
nor in timeline
true friendship transcends death

your final words, off screen, Mr. Nimoy,
were your blessing, LLAP
“Live Long and Prosper”
fully human, fully Vulcan
even at the end
you gave yourself,
to give us Spock

You did not feel this sacrifice a vain or empty one,
and we will not debate your profound wisdom at these proceedings
Of our friend
We can only say this:
Of all the souls we have encountered in our travels,
yours was the most …
human

“Dear Pluto”

by Christopher Fox Graham
April 20, 2012

To the planet formerly known as Pluto,

Though we will never meet
I think I know you

I am a speck of organic matter
standing on the surface of your sister
my people and I
are converted from ice and dust
electrified into existence
by the mere circumstances
of your sister Earth and nephew Moon
dancing with tide pools
when they were still in their infancy

mere molecules slammed together
and held onto each other in strings
which took billions of years
to mistake themselves in their reproduction
to form this all-too-young boy
sending you this letter

forgive my impetuousness, dear Pluto
but compared to you,
I only have a second
before this organic matter caves in on itself
becomes dust and water to form something new

all I have is my voice
and I beg you to listen
because although we will never meet
I think I know you

I’m not sure if you will receive this letter
In the time it takes to reach you,
I could bounce between here and the sun 16 times
measured on your timescale
my country is not even a year old yet

You’re farther away from the sun
than any of your siblings
and while the rest of those planets circulate in lockstep
in the same elliptical orbit

yours is full of highs and lows
as you rise above the plane
and drop beneath it
because you’re either bipolar
of you just refuse to conform

be glad you’ve been able to do it so long
here, those who are different
either by choice or accident
wind up getting bullied, brutalized or crucified

and while I could explain what those words mean
let’s hope that by the time one of us stands on your surface
we’ve forgotten what they mean, too

At Lowell Observatory in the hills overlooking Flagstaff
astronomer Clyde Tombaugh picked you out from the black
he watched you wander
at the edge of the solar system
and noted how you keep your distance
from everyone else like you

I know what it feels like to be alone, too
there are times when people here
believe the sun is so far away
they don’t feel warm anymore
and they stare out into the black
and wonder what’s like to just
let go

I’m glad you’ve stayed with us, dear Pluto
you show us that even when the universe is terrifying cold
there’s some light to hold on to
some reason to keep moving

and even out there,
you and your moon Charon
prove you can find love anywhere

since we began to worship stars
we have followed your siblings
the rocky worlds, the gas giants
to us, if they were bigger than an asteroid or moon
and weren’t furnaces like the sun,
they were a planet
deserving the name of a god
an astrological house
and a certain amount of inexplicable reverence

you were nine children of a yellow sun
on the rural edge of the galaxy

but now because your size doesn’t fit new rules
the International Astronomical Union on my world
has decided you are no longer a planet

you don’t meet the qualifications anymore

you no longer govern an astrological house

they took you away from you were to us

because some ink on paper said you didn’t matter anymore

they put you a box labeled “dwarf planets” or “Plutoids”
only to be ostracized from your brothers and sisters
by faceless strangers at the stroke of pen

here, we label people too,
segregate them into boxes
based on the color of their skins
or which one of those gods they called out to while dying
or whether they love someone with the same or different parts
or in what way they their throats make noises to communicate
or even by where they were born
as if “point of origin” means anything
on a planet spinning 1,600 kilometers per second,
where specks like me
have wandered to every part of it

tell me, dear Pluto
can you see the borders of our nations from out there?
it seems that’s all we can see down here sometimes
can you even tell us apart?
if we one day reach you
dig our fingers into your dirt
would you care
about what language we used
to tell each other
how beautiful the moment was?

Dear Pluto,
I know what it feels like to be small
I’m still a little boy, too
playing grown-up games
wondering what happens
when there’s nothing left to orbit anymore

Though we will never meet
you don’t have to answer this letter if it ever reaches you
but I think you know me:
I am a tiny voice
on your sister Earth
and you are Pluto,
always the ninth planet of the sun

“Clyde Tombaugh”

A companion poem to “Dear Pluto”

by Christopher Fox Graham
Jan. 27, 2016

The Kansas boy stares into the sky
counting stars with his fingers
pretending he can touch each one
playing piano keys with constellations

the spheres make music most us will never hear
but he orchestrates symphonies
oboes in Orion
clarinets in Cancer
violins in Virgo
percussion rumbling off supernova timpanies
snare drums on the skin of black holes
while spinning quasars
keep
perfect
rhythm

the boy, now a teen, measures stars with his telescopes
built from leftover parts
shaping steel and mirrors
to bend the light down into his hands
he wants to hold the weight of stardust
in his palm

the boy, now a man,
works on Mars Hill
the evening shift at Lowell Observatory
scouring the images for differences
one single speck out of place
but these were skies he could paint from memory

on a night like tonight
a cold February
the man became a boy again
when he found a spot
hide-and-seeking with him
telling him the stars and planets were looking back at us
an undiscovered instrument
making music he was the first to hear

a ninth symphony he held for a moment
heard alone, echoing in solitary discovery
before he shared it with the world

76 years later,
nine years after his death
mankind’s ship in a bottle
broke the bonds of earth to reach out
and find New Horizons
in the cold dark of space

in a case no bigger than heart of a boy
now 2.97 billion miles from Kansas
from Mars Hill
from our entire history
are the ashes of the man
who first heard the music

after nine years alone in the dark
he traveled farther than anyone in history
to visit a world unseen by human eyes

and last July, the man became a boy again
matching his imagination to the planet in front of him
visiting an undiscovered country
held for a moment
a solitary discovery
before he shared it with our world

at that distance, signals and light
take five and half hours to reach home
in those hours,
Clyde Tombaugh,
you had a world captivated in the silence
waiting 4 billion years
for someone to visit

what did you talk about?

did she ask
what the sun feels like
when so much closer?

how it warms your skin in summer?

did she tell you her story?

what it’s like to be so far away, alone in night?

how her years pass in centuries?

did you tell her about us?

about Kansas
about Mars Hill
about what it feels like to hold stardust in your palm?

did you tell her there were 7 billion boys and girls back home
waiting to see her for the first time?

was she eager to meet you since she first saw you
playing hide and seek with your telescopes
or counting stars with your fingers

or did she
just sing a song?

one half of an unfinished duet
a harmony you already knew
something slow
and beautiful
a secret
only two lovers
can understand