Monday, February 18, 2008
This Day in the Discovery of Dwarf Planets
On this day in 1930, the former 9th planet Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh, an American astronomer, after three decades of work at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. Other astronomers knew it was there, from the changes it caused in the orbits of Neptune and Uranus, but none went through the tedius process of photographing through a telescope small areas of the sky at night and looking for tiny changes among the unchanging field of stars in the photos during the day, until Tombaugh undertook the grunt work successfully.
Labels: Pluto; Clyde Tombaugh
# posted by Roger Fraley @ 7:08 AM 
