Astronomy:

Visiting The Great Observatories

LO, Flagstaff, Arizona:

Lowell Observatory sits atop Mars Hill, in a beautiful mountain town at the crossroads of northern Arizona. This is an astronomer's paradise if ever I saw one! The campus hosts one of the most beautiful telescopes you'll ever see, Percival Lowell's own 24 inch Alvan Clark-built refractor. The instrument sits much as it has for the past 100+ years, looking like a shiny silver pinnacle of 19th Century engineering - which in fact it is. Even the finder scope, a 4 inch refractor, is shiny brass. The observatory dome, built of native wood, is also all original, full of the smell of seasoned timber and machine oil. You notice one wonderful inside joke immediately: the dome rolls on old Ford Truck wheels (look beyond the scope in the photo)! These were fitted in the 1950s, and they squeak loudly under pressure when the motors twist the large round roof. This scope is still in use and is open for public viewing every week.

While Percival Lowell was most famous for studying Mars, he also sponsored the search for a "Planet X" beyond the orbit of Neptune. A young astronomer named Clyde Tombaugh, who was working at Lowell in 1930, discovered the body we call Pluto using the now brightly-painted 13 inch imaging scope on the left. Note this instrument has no eyepiece for visual observing; it is designed exclusively as a camera. Mr. Tombaugh compared thousands of small dots on large photographic plates, until he noticed the small moving speck which became our 9th planet. In the early part of this century, a debate rages over whether Pluto can maintain its status as a full-fledged planet, when it appears to be one of many similar small bodies known as Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) - a whole cloud of big rocks orbiting the Sun in the far, cold reaches of our Solar System. The path to the dome housing this scope is the "Pluto Walk," a scale model of our Solar System using a series of signposts. The day we visited in Spring 2001, a late season ice & snowstorm provided a stinging cold sensation of really being in the far end of the Solar System.