Lowell Observatory
Near Flagstaff, Arizona
On a pine-covered mesa just west of downtown Flagstaff stands a cluster of white domes that has shaped how human beings understand the solar system. Lowell Observatory was founded in eighteen ninety-four by Percival Lowell, a Boston Brahmin who abandoned a career in business to pursue an obsession with the planet Mars. He chose Flagstaff for the altitude, the clean air, and the number of clear nights per year, and he set to work convinced that the network of linear features Schiaparelli had observed on Mars were irrigation canals built by a dying civilization desperate to move water from the polar ice caps to their parched equatorial cities.
Lowell was wrong about Mars, as later missions would conclusively demonstrate. But his willingness to chase a grand idea to the edge of the Colorado Plateau had lasting consequences. He spent his final years calculating the position of what he called Planet X, a hypothetical world beyond Neptune whose gravity, he believed, was subtly tugging on Uranus's orbit. He died in nineteen sixteen without finding it.
Thirteen years later, in nineteen twenty-nine, a young Kansas farmhand and amateur astronomer named Clyde Tombaugh arrived at Lowell Observatory as a junior staff member. Given the painstaking task of comparing photographic plates of the same patch of sky taken days apart, Tombaugh spent months at his blink comparator, the device that alternated between two images to reveal anything that had moved. On February eighteenth, nineteen thirty, he spotted a faint dot shifting position against the background stars. The observatory announced the discovery on March thirteenth, chosen to coincide with Percival Lowell's birthday. The new world was named Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld, and the first two letters were not accidental: they are Percival Lowell's initials.
Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet in two thousand six, but the discovery telescope still stands here, and Lowell Observatory remains one of the most historically significant research institutions in the American West.
