'Planet' Pluto comes into view (BBC) {!}
There are three letters you need to know this year: BTH.
They stand for "Better Than Hubble"; and in the next few months, we're going to witness two remarkable BTH events.
The first will come on 26 January when the Dawn spacecraft starts to return our best views yet of Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
The second - and the one I'm most looking forward to - will occur from May onwards as the New Horizons probe bears down on Pluto, and we get its pictures back.
As awesome as Hubble's capabilities are, the venerable telescope has given us only a blobby perspective on these worlds, and in the case of Pluto even the word "blob" describes way more detail than we actually have.
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more: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-30746650
= new reply since forum marked as read
stripped of it's full planet rank, I've been hoping that when we finally get there the first thing we see is a giant banner with the words:
"We are a PLANET, damn it !"
. . . in all seriousness, I'm looking forward to these images. 
As for the "it IS a planet" goofiness (speaking of pluto)
people who make that 'argument', such as it is, are being willfully ignorant of reality, or else they're just being difficult for the sake of itself. If Pluto is a "Planet" we have thousands.
