Long before Flagstaff earned its reputation as an International Dark Sky City, a young man with no college degree and a homemade telescope proved just how much could be seen from these skies. In 1930, working out of an observatory on a hill above town, he discovered a new planet, and in doing so, wrote Flagstaff permanently into the history of astronomy.
A Telescope Built From Spare Parts
Clyde Tombaugh grew up on a farm in Burdett, Kansas. When a hailstorm wiped out his family’s crops and any hope of paying for college, he did not give up on astronomy. Instead, at twenty years old, he taught himself to grind his own lenses and mirrors, building a series of telescopes from farm parts and mail-order glass. He used one of these homemade instruments to sketch detailed observations of Mars and Jupiter, then mailed the drawings to Lowell Observatory, hoping for feedback from real astronomers.
Instead of a critique, he received a job offer. In January 1929, at just twenty-two, Tombaugh arrived in Flagstaff to join the observatory staff.
The Night He Found a New World
Lowell Observatory had been searching for a theoretical ninth planet since the early 1900s, a project begun by founder Percival Lowell and known as the hunt for Planet X. Tombaugh’s job was tedious: photograph the same patch of night sky on different evenings, then compare the plates for anything that moved against the fixed backdrop of stars.
On February 18, 1930, after months of careful comparison, he spotted it: a faint point of light that had shifted position. Lowell Observatory announced the discovery of Pluto on March 13, 1930. Tombaugh was twenty-four years old, and he had done what professional astronomers around the world had failed to do for decades.
Flagstaff’s Dark Sky Legacy
That discovery is a large part of why Flagstaff carries its Dark Sky City designation today, the first city in the world to earn that title. Lowell Observatory still sits on Mars Hill overlooking downtown, and the same clear, high altitude skies that let a self-taught farm boy find a new world are still there for anyone willing to look up. Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006, but that has done nothing to diminish what Tombaugh accomplished. In 2015, when NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft became the first to reach Pluto, it carried a small capsule of his ashes on board.
Bring the Stars Home at Little America
Guests at Little America Flagstaff do not need an observatory to appreciate what Tombaugh found. Our property sits on 500 acres of ponderosa pine forest, well away from the brightest parts of downtown, where the night sky still opens up the way it did in 1930. Spend the evening over dinner at Silver Pine Restaurant and Bar, then step outside afterward and look up. On a clear Flagstaff night, it is easy to understand why a young man with a homemade telescope found something no one else could see.