Clyde Tombaugh

A Kansas Portrait

Late in the afternoon of February 18, 1930, 24-year-old Clyde Tombaugh sat in a laboratory room at the Lowell Observatory near Flagstaff, Arizona. For hours, he had been gazing into the eyepiece of a Zeiss Blink Microscope at photographic images of a star field, taken several hours apart.

Suddenly the monotony was broken when his attention was caught by one of the millions of minute specks of lights whose image had moved slightly between one photograph and the next. He checked and rechecked his photographs for 45 minutes before calling his supervisors, who confirmed that Clyde Tombaugh, a farm boy from Burdette, Kansas, with nothing but a high school education had indeed discovered the ninth and most removed planet in the solar system, christened Pluto for the God of Darkness. Tombaugh went from being an anonymous planet hunter to an internationally famous astronomer over night.

On the heels of his great discovery, he received an offer of a scholarship for Kansas University which he accepted. He is credited with the discovery of several galactic star clusters, hundreds of asteroids, a comet, a cluster of 1,800 galaxies and other observations. Clyde Tombaugh was one Kansas farm boy who truly understood the meaning of his state's motto, "To the Stars Through Difficulty."