# @downinnadesert on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DdZqz5nEorU
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/70597301-downinnadesert-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/23f075ce5c.jpg
- **Posted:** 2026-09-17T20:00:14.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Down In The Desert🌵 (@downinnadesert) — https://gondola.cc/downinnadesert

## Caption

A planet was found in Arizona by a 24 year old from Kansas who had built his telescope out of a cream separator and his dad’s old Buick.

Clyde Tombaugh grew up on farms in Illinois and then Kansas. He ordered a small telescope out of the Sears Roebuck catalog as a teenager, found it was not good enough for looking at planets, and decided to build a better one himself. He ground the mirrors by hand. The parts came off the farm. Tractor pieces, a cream separator, the crankshaft out of his father’s old Buick.

In 1928 he used it to make careful drawings of Mars and Jupiter.

That same year a hailstorm destroyed the family’s crops and there was no money to send him to college.

So he mailed his drawings to Vesto Slipher, the director of Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, hoping somebody there would look at them and tell him what he was doing wrong.

They sent back a job offer.

The timing was almost absurd. Percival Lowell had spent the last decade of his life hunting a ninth planet he was certain was out there. He died in 1916 and the search died with him while his estate got tied up in a contested will. In 1927 his nephew restarted it with a $10,000 grant from Harvard and built a new 13 inch telescope. They needed someone to run the photography.

Tombaugh got to Flagstaff in January 1929, 22 years old, no degree. He photographed the sky at night and compared plates by day, looking for a single point of light that had moved. As the new guy he also stoked the fires and shoveled snow off the telescope roof.

On February 18, 1930, he found it.

He went on to catalog hundreds of asteroids, star clusters and galaxies. He taught physics and Navy navigation at what is now NAU, right there in Flagstaff, during the war. He finally got his bachelor’s degree in 1936, six years after discovering a planet.

Pluto got reclassified as a dwarf planet on August 24, 2006. Twenty years ago last month.

One more thing. When the Smithsonian asked whether they could put the telescope he built in 1928 on display, he told them he was still using it.

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#Pluto #LowellObservatory #Flagstaff #ArizonaNews #DownInnaDesert

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## Tags

lowellobservatory, downinnadesert, flagstaff, pluto, arizonanews

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