PLANET PLUTO DISCOVERED
How long since you considered it? Give thanks to an amateur astronomer, a farm boy from Kansas named Clyde Tombaugh, if you ever think about that distant wanderer at all. In 1929 at the time Clyde got off the train in Flagstaff, Arizona, there was an ongoing debate among star- gazers about the supposed existence of “Planet X.” According to speculation at the time, that “ninth planet” would be located so far away from the earth that unusual measures would have to be taken to spot it. Clyde Tombaugh had a couple of things going for him. First, a 13-inch diameter telescope at Flagstaff’s Mars Hill observatory could be trained on the night sky from an altitude of 7,230 feet. That height helped cut out some of the earth’s atmospheric “clutter.” Second, Clyde could record star images on 14″x17″ glass photographic plates and use a machine called a “blink comparator” to examine them. Clyde used its microscope to examine two exposures…
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