Local History: Clyde Tombaugh

Clyde Tombaugh, was a farm boy from Illinois who loved looking at the night sky. Using spare equipment he could find, he fashioned his own telescopes from scratch. He would grind the lenses and mirrors by hand, and fashion mounts out of tractor parts. Tombaugh began making detailed sketches of Mars and Jupiter, and then mailed them to the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff. Despite having no formal degree, in 1929 the observatory was so impressed by his work that they offered him a job.

Percival Lowell had long theorized that there was a mysterious ninth planet beyond neptune, which he called “Planet X”. Tombaugh’s first assignment at the observatory was to search for the mysterious “Planet X”. He carefully studied thousands of star fields using a blink comparator (a device that rapidly compared photographic plates). On February 18, 1930 Tombaugh spotted a faint moving object, that object turned out to the be the mysterious “Planet X”, or now known as Pluto. He was just 24 years old at the time of the discovery. 

Tombaugh gained instant fame from the discovery. Newspapers hailed him as “the boy who found a planet”. Later in life he earned a bachelors and masters degree in Astronomy. Tombaugh was known for his patience and meticulousness, and often joked that he discovered Pluto by “blinking until my eyes nearly fell out.”

Clyde Tombaugh died on January 17, 1997 at the age of 90. In 2006, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft was launched towards Pluto and carried some of Tombaugh’s ashes on board. New Horizons flew by Pluto in 2015, fulfilling a rather poetic journey - the man who discovered Pluto, “returned” to it.