Astronomy was where America began to emerge from European domination of science. The wealthy patrons who funded telescopes and universities made certain the discoveries were heavily publicized. Even out in Kansas Clyde Tombaugh found his interest. He did well inscience and math student and dreamt of leaving the farm for the University of Kansas.
Then the hail came..
Spend any time in the Midwest or West and you'll see the hail shafts associated with violent thunderstorms. I found them beautiful until I saw the crop damage at the farm of a family friend - two weeks before harvest and most of his Winter wheat gone in a few minutes. They had crop insurance. No one did in Clyde's time. He wasn't going to college.
He spent time in the library reading every about astronomy and came across one of the amateur telescope making books. Athletes with exceptional ball control are said to have "good hands." In telescope making it means you can make a parabolic mirror with that is accurate to a fraction of a wavelength of light across it's surface. It takes patience and skill - I made one as a teen that, well, let's just say I didn't have good hands,.
The Tombaugh farm was dark - many parts of the state hadn't seen electricity to the farm yet. He set himself to observation paying particular attention to Jupiter. Amateur astrophotography wasn't useful yet, so you made pencil drawings. Clyde's were beautiful and accurate. He had the ability to look at Jupiter for long periods and mentally subtract out some of the atmospheric distortion - a hallmark of the best observers of the day. He was a natural.
In 1929 he sent a packet of his drawings to the Lowell Observatory asking if they could use someone like him. It arrived completely out of the blue. It turns out they were excited.. but perhaps for a different reason.
Percival Lowell was the scion of Boston's Lowell family. He went the Harvard route with interests in the Far East, astronomy and math. With serious money at his command he built a state-of the art observatory in Flagstaff, New Mexico and set about studying Mars. His telescope wasn't good enough to accurately show the features of Mars, but good enough to give hints. His imagination enhanced his drawings and an elaborate canal system emerged. A system that changed with the seasons. Astronomers, some armed with comparable telescopes and a good deal more experience, considered it poppycock, but the press went nuts. Early science fiction and even a few religions had people excited about life on the Moon and nearby planets. Did you know the men and women who inhabited the Moon stood over six feet tall and were covered with fur, or that Martians were under three feet tall with huge eyes and a greenish, hairless skin? It sold a lot of newspapers and dime novels and perhaps got kids reading. There was even this writer, HG Wells, whose fleshing out the pseudoscience of the day became art.
Shortly after the dawn of the 20th century Lowell had been thrououghly debunked by astronomers with better telescopes and astrophotographs. Undaunted and wanting to save his reputation. he turned his attention to Planet X - a conjecture that a planet existed beyond Neptune. He had noticed irregularities in the orbits of Nepture and Uranus and, from that, make predictions of where a mass - a planet - might be. The word planet goes at least as far back as the Greeks and means wanderer. A planet appears to move relative to the stars. The hunt involved taking high quality photographic plates of interesting areas of the sky. Later he'd photograph the same areas and look for the differences. You take advantage of a neat little feature of human vision.
If you look at two identical slides with images on them - one through each eye - and flash a light at the same rate behind each, you get a single flashing image. But if anything is different on one of the plates -- say one of the little dots has moved - you see it blink. We're spectacularly good at this. Lowell spent ten years observing and using his blink comparator, but nothing.
His will was generous with the observatory. They could embark on new missions and expand. But there was this one little problem -- the will specified they had to continue the search for Planet X. Most professional astronomers thought this a wild goose chase. The observatory had been fitted with a golden albatross.
Tombaugh's letter arrived out of the blue in the late 20s. The images were at the limit of what one would expect from a telescope that size. They immediately recognized the work of someone with enormous patience and exceptional integrity. Someone who could rid them of the golden albatross.
They'd set him up in a corner by himself with a small patrol telescope. He'd photograph at night and search on the blink comparator during the day. They figured he'd do it until he got bored - maybe even the rest of his life - and he wouldn't embarass them. They'd be free of the goose chase and could get on with real science.
Clyde surprised them. On the 18th of February in 1930 there was a tiny blinking dot. It was confirmed on other days and an orbit calculated. It wasn't possible to calculate the mass at the time - Lowell had predicted a heavy body - but the tiny dot was in about the right place.
Maybe it was that delightful bright note during that came during the Winter of the beginning of the Depression, but the discovery gripped the public imagination and was featured in newsreels that were shown with movies. Clyde became a national hero - farmboy from Kansas discovers a planet perhaps as big as Jupiter and well beyond Nepture.. or so said the headlines. People wrote in with names.
The astronomy community wasn't buying it. The orbit wasn't in the ecliptic - the plane of the rotation of the Sun and the orbits of all of the other planets. They thought he found a trans Neptunian object. But astronomy had become hot and contributions were finding their way to university astronomy departments in a depression. Collectively the community sighed and sat on it.
Pluto's discoverer finally made it to the University of Kansas earning bachelor's and master's degrees in astronomy. Imagine what it must have been like for his first astronomy professor to have him as a student. This person who had popularized astronomy far more than any professional. After WII Clyde taught astronomy at New Mexico State until his retirement. Throughout his life he did fine work popularizing this passion of his.
Lowell's calculation was flawed. This Pluto thing, note that PL are his initials, just happened to be about in the right place and one of the few people who could have discovered it at the time was on the case. It wasn't until the late 70s when Pluto's mass could be reliably calculated - it turns out to be small. It was an amazing find.
serendipity is the word that comes to mind
I know this guy who works in Pasadena who decided to make a case that Pluto wasn't a planet. He calls himself Pluto Killer. He specializes in trans-Neptunian objects and Kuiper Belt Objects. New definitions were needed to describe the rich weirdness that was turning up. Pluto may not be a planet, but it is awfully interesting. Then a guy at the Hayden Planetarium took up the cause. Imagine Neil deGrasse Tyson getting hate mail. And from school children. For whatever reason people wanted Pluto to remain a planet. They lost. Now Mike has predicted his own Planet X. Now more than a few are looking and people suggest names to him.
About two years ago the New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto sending back a treasure of information images that raises questions no one imagined. The images are amazing - hunt a few down. Now it's on it's way to Kuiper Belt Object. From there it's straight on to eternity.
There's a small container inside.1 The inscription says:
Interred herein are remains of American Clyde W. Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto and the solar system's 'third zone'. Adelle and Muron's boy, Patricia's husband, Annette and Alden's father, astronomer, teacher, punster, and friend: Clyde W. Tombaugh (1906–1997)
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1 I find astronomy to be the most romantic of the sciences and astronomers to be the most romantic of the scientists. Hard rockers are the most gonzo, biochemists the most integrative, climatologists and oceanographers the most dedicated to the planet, but romantic -- that's astronomers.
At JPL on the day of the flyby several people wore simple t-shirts that said godspeed clyde tombaugh
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tips you can use:
For those of you (like me) who still have corded earbuds there's a neat trick to minimize tangles. Most people simply wind the cord around their fingers. The problem is unidirectional winding introduces twists (try it with a flat ribbon). If you wind in a figure eight pattern you make a twist and then add another that turns in the opposite direction. They cancel each other. Just drop the cord between your middle fingers and wind about. When you're done secure the middle with a little clip.
I've been doing this since my undergrad days. It's a good way to spot physicists and mathematicians.
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