Naming Pluto (DVD) Producer/Director: Ginita Jimenez Publisher: Father Films Price: £9.99 (40 mins incl extras)
Buy from supplier www.fatherfilms.com/shop

This delightful 13-minute film chronicling the naming of Pluto by Venetia Burney (now Venetia Burney Phair) in 1930 is a gentle telling of one of astronomy's memorable human stories.

Venetia Burney was only eleven years old in March 1930 when she suggested to her grandfather, Falconer Medan - who ran Oxford University's Bodleian Library - that Clyde Tombaugh's newly discovered world should be named Pluto. Through her grandfather's contacts the suggestion reached Herbert Hall Turner, former president of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), who conveyed it via telegram to the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, from where Tombaugh discovered Pluto. The rest, as they say, is history.

When New Horizon launched towards Pluto in January 2006, Venetia Burney had still not seen Pluto through a telescope. An effort by Sir Patrick Moore to show her Pluto through his telescope was clouded out, but the film then takes us to the former site of the Royal Observatory at Herstmonceux, where Venetia finally sees the distant, fourteenth magnitude pinprick of light that she so famously named.

With contributions from not only Patrick Moore but also Oxford University's Allan Chapman and Robert Massey of the RAS, the film certainly isn't without charisma and expertise, while a trip Venetia makes to a local school shows that children still have the innocent imagination that so inspired the name Venetia chose 79 years ago. Produced and directed by Ginita Jimenez, this heart-warming account will surely inspire all who watch it.

Keith Cooper