Star cruising with Corot
Corot surveys Corot’s “Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld”.
French rocket scientists have asserted that Corot, the name of their just-launched planet-hunting spacecraft, stands for COnvection, ROtation and planetary Transits, but it’s pretty obvious that somewhere in the midst of their planners and designers is a guy who knows his art history.
Face it, if the satellite namers really wanted to call this one Convection, Rotation and Planetary Transits, it would be CRPT, but in English that might come out looking like something between “crap” and “crackpot”, so they called in the arty guy.
“Well,” we can hear him meekly suggesting (in French, of course), “there was the painter Camille Corot, who travelled a great deal around the countryside looking for subject matter.”
Magnifique! See the rest.
