Pluto: 80 Years of "The Little Planet That Could"

“It was Flagstaff, Arizona. The stars were shining bright. Clyde was gazing at the heavens on that fateful winter night.” So begins Elias Fey’s “New Horizons: A Tribute to Clyde Tombaugh and the New Horizons Mission,” an inspiring tribute to planet Pluto, its discoverer Clyde Tombaugh, and NASA’s New Horizons mission currently speeding to Pluto. The CD can be purchased from http://www.eliasfey.com . As with many works of art, there is a bit of dramatization in the song. Eighty years ago today, 24-year-old Clyde Tombaugh did in fact discover Pluto, but it was not via direct observation on February 18, 1930, a cloudy night in Flagstaff, Arizona. On that afternoon, Tombaugh was blinking photographic plates taken on January 23 and 29 of that year, centered on the star Delta Geminorum, as part of the Lowell Observatory’s search for a trans-Neptunian planet, when he discovered a tiny dot that moved during the six-day interval.Ironically, the astronomer who initiated the search, Percival Lowell, died in 1916 without realizing that he had in fact found the planet for which he was looking. He never recognized it because it was much fainter than the giant planet he believed was out there. Yet images of ...