Pluto

My favorite photo of Clyde Tombaugh is one where he is sitting on splintery wooden stairs at the family farm near Burdett, Kansas. He’s 22, with a short crew cut and simple wire-frame glasses. His plain-stitched shirt is baggy and rolled up to the elbows. He has on dark overalls that are dusty, many sizes too big, and hang on his slender frame. He looks through the eyepiece of a metal telescope, the third telescope he’s made from scratch: the main lens case is a section of axel from the Buick rotting behind the barn, and the eyepiece is off of a broken cream separator. Behind him are shrubs and weeds and a big sky, gray in the black and white photograph. It’s 1928, his family’s sixth year on the farm.

Before Kansas, the Tombaughes lived in Streator, Illinois – where Clyde and his 5 siblings were born – a square, brick city at the time, 100 miles southwest of Chicago. His father Muron was an engineer on a steam-driven threshing rig, and his mother Adella ran the house and raised the kids.

It wasn’t until sixth grade that Clyde first considered the sky. Around the same time, his father and Uncle Lee bought a 3 inch diameter telescope, slightly too big to fit into an overall pocket. More often than not, the telescope spent the night with Clyde, who stayed up late, after his parents and younger brothers and sisters all went to bed, when the kitchen and the trees and the air were still, to sit outside and look up.

In 1922, when Muron decided to move the family to Pawnee County Kansas for better soil and to have their own farm, the little telescope went with Clyde.

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This semester, on a window facing the dining hall, some friends have put up a countdown until graduation. The numerals are a foot or so tall and are made up of post-it notes, arranged on the glass to form block digits, like the type on alarm clocks or calculators. I noticed the numbers at the start of the semester, but then I stopped walking by the building, and then the days slipped by one after the other without me noticing. Recently I walked past the window and the number was fifteen, looking cheerful in neon blue and pink. Soon, the little squares will form a big ugly donut, and it will be time to drive home.

I’ll start off by heading south on I-295, as if it were any other innocent day trip in early summer. At the Falmouth interchange I’ll stay left towards Portland, passing by the string of familiar exits that beckon me towards favorite spots in the city: Exit 8 – the eastern promenade; exit 6a – the Holy Donut across from the park; exit 3 – Omi’s coffee shop. But the exits will also countdown to zero, and then I’ll be on I-95 for 50 miles, through the piney forests of southern Maine and past the truck stop near Kennebunk. I’ll cross the teal trestle bridge at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with the big green sign reminding me, as if I didn’t already know, that I’m leaving vacationland. To cope, it suggests I live free or die.

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Kansas was unusually hot the summer the Tombough’s arrived in 1922. The new farmhouse was smaller, one full story with an attic above, no basement, and two chimneys. Next to the house was a small barn and a spindly wooden windmill. Beyond, fields stretched in every direction; the sky reached its full hemisphere. Clyde finished his last three years of highschool at the nearby school in Burdett. Tall, stringy, and strong, he was the town’s star pole vaulter and a state finalist in physics. In his spare time, he built telescopes from designs in Popular Science.

The nights were dark on the Tombaugh’s new farm. When the sky was clear, Clyde would go to the splintery stairs, where there was a bit of level ground to set the telescope and the view of the sky was uninterrupted. He brought a lantern, and a pad of paper and pencil when Mars, Jupiter, or Saturn were close. Back and forth to match every swirl, curve, and ring, the hours slid by and he found himself shuffled in a new position, as the sky had rotated.

In fall of 1928, Clyde was looking through an old issue of Popular Astronomy when he read an article about an observatory in Arizona, and a picture alongside the article of Mars, that looked just like what he had sketched. Printed at the bottom was an address and a name of a research director. Clyde chose his two best portraits of Jupiter and Mars and enclosed them in a letter, asking for criticism and critique on his portraits.

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The Mass Pike is the longest section but always feels the shortest. I know I get on at Worcester and get off at Albany, but in between is a blur of trees and chain link fences, gravel banks, and hills. There’s Sturbridge and Stockbridge, and Springfield and Palmer, and just from the drive I wouldn’t have a chance at placing them in the order I’ll pass them. After two hours I’ll cross the Hudson at Albany. It will have been four hours since leaving campus and the tall pine trees, only an hour and a half left. The road and scenery will look more familiar now. I hope it’s clear, and warm enough to crack the window. I’ll remember how green everything is in the beginning of summer.

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A few weeks later in early March, there was an envelope for Clyde Tombaugh. The return address was the Lowell Observatory, Flagstaff. They had liked his drawings, and thought he must have a careful hand and quite a professional telescope to draw so accurately. After a short exchange, they wondered if he might want a job. Clyde wrote back: yes, he would.

When Tombaugh arrived in Flagstaff a month later in 1929, the observatory was only a small wooden dome. Along with giving tours and maintaining the telescopes, one of Clyde’s jobs was to take wide-angle photos of the night sky using a 13 inch diameter astrograph, in search of a planet beyond Neptune. Just as Neptune was discovered because of inconsistencies with the orbit of Uranus, astronomers had noticed similar deviations in Neptune’s orbit, the result of, they hypothesized, a dense planet, dubbed Planet-X. Unbeknownst to astronomers at the time, the massive planet they were looking for didn’t exist – the formulas were wrong because the mass of Neptune had been miscalculated. Still, on clear nights after dinner, Clyde would climb up the dirt road up to the observatory to take photos of the sky looking for Planet-X. The desert air was cool and dry, and the observatory was silent as he used the little red astrograph.

The mornings after taking photos, Clyde would develop the slides of film in a small shack near the main building. In the late afternoons he’d compare the photos taken on previous nights, looking at the grainy black pictures covered with pinpricks of light. Scouring the photos that weren’t much bigger than a postcard, he looked for a tiny dot that would move over the course of several nights.

One Tuesday afternoon in February, almost exactly a year since he had arrived, he found what he was looking for, an unassuming dot no bigger than a pinhead creeping across the sky. Clyde checked and rechecked his work to make sure it wasn’t a smudge. That evening, he showed what he had found to the head astronomer, and a few weeks later the observatory announced that Clyde Tombaugh had discovered Planet-X. Nevermind that decades later, astronomers would realize Planet-X would turn out to have a much smaller mass than previously predicted; Clyde Tombaugh was a discoverer of worlds.

There was a naming contest. There were flashbulbs and interviews and reporters. The American and Royal Astronomical Societies invited Clyde to speaking events. It all went very fast.

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Off the thruway, I’ll turn left at the old school house with flaking white paint, taking County Route 23. The fields on either side of the road are small, and forest dominates. By late spring, they will be covered in grass, fresh and deep green. There’s a road marker: “Cooperstown, 5 miles.”

Coming into the little village, I will go straight, through the first two intersections. At the third stop sign, I will turn right onto my street. There are six other houses between the corner and mine. The blue house will come into view. I will turn left into my driveway.

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In July the same year Pluto was found, the Times ran an article “Kansas Star-Gazer Farms.” Tombaugh came back from the desert on vacation to help his father with the harvest, to drive the tractor, the article said. “When the wheat harvest comes, even a star-gazer gets back to earth.” He was back, in the fields under the big sky: home.