Harrington Regio

Harrington Regio (formerly Balrog Macula) is the largest of the "Brass Knuckles", a series of equatorial dark regions on Pluto.

Harrington Regio

The Brass Knuckles chain of equatorial dark regions on Pluto, with Harrington Regio labeled as "Balrog"
Feature type	Regio
Location	Pluto
Coordinates	6.58°N 309.63°E / 6.58; 309.63
Eponym	Robert Sutton Harrington

It is the largest dark equatorial feature on Pluto after the Belton Regio, and is located in the middle of the leading hemisphere.

It was initially informally named Balrog Macula after the balrogs, a race of demons in the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien.^[1][2] However, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) instead officially approved the name Harrington Regio after Robert Sutton Harrington, an American astronomer who is considered to have co-discovered Charon.^[3][4]

References

1. Chang, Kenneth (14 July 2015). "NASA's New Horizons Spacecraft Completes Flyby of Pluto". The New York Times. Retrieved 14 July 2015.
2. Rogers, Adam (14 July 2015). "The New, Nerdy Mythology of Pluto's Place Names". Wired. Retrieved 14 July 2015.
3. "Harrington Regio". Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature. IAU/NASA/USGS. Retrieved 11 September 2024.
4. Worley, Charles (1 September 1993). "Robert Sutton Harrington (1942–1993)". baas.aas.org. AAS. Retrieved 11 September 2024.