1. Clyde William Tombaugh was born February 4, 1906 in Streator, Illinois.
2. He first looked through a telescope in August, 1918 at age 12 and became hooked on outer space when he saw the mountains and craters of the moon.
3. At age 16 his family moved to Burdett, Kansas. Clyde hoped to study astronomy at college but was needed on the family farm so was unable to go.
4. Not being able to afford a bigger telescope, he built one himself from metal on the farm that he could adapt and a mail order mirror that he meticulously hand ground and polished to just the right curvature.
5. He made highly detailed drawings of what he could see of Jupiter and Mars and sent them off to the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. What he lacked in education he made up for in passion and he was hired to work their new camera telescope.
6. Some of his other duties at Lowell included giving tours of the observatory and climbing onto the dome outside to push snow off after frequent winter storms.
7. Clyde spent months taking photographs of sections of sky taken several nights apart. Then, using a blink comparator he compared the two images. A moving object such as a planet would appear to jump from one position to another, while more distant objects such as stars would appear stationary.
8. On October 5, 1929 Clyde discovered the first of 14 asteroids he would find.
9. On February 18, 1930, the elusive Planet X that he had been searching for was spotted and tracked by Clyde and his discovery was announced to the world on March 13.
10. Clyde Tombaugh was just 24 years old.
11. The name "Pluto" was decided on partly because that was the Roman god of the underworld who was able to render himself invisible and partly because Percival Lowell, the observatory's namesake's initials were PL.
12. Now a scientific superstar, Clyde was finally able to realize his dream of higher education and he entered the University of Kansas in 1932, earning a Bachelor of Science degree and then a Master's Degree.
13. In 1934 Mr. Tombaugh took a bride when he wed Patricia Edson.
14. On August 20, 1949 he became a very credible witness of several UFOs near Las Cruces, New Mexico that he described as "six to eight rectangular lights" in the sky. In later years he chastised fellow scientists for not being more open-minded to the possibility of extraterrestial visitors.
15. During World War II Clyde taught celestial navigation for the U.S.Navy.
16. After the war, he invented several useful systems for tracking rockets while working at White Sands, New Mexico.
17. Starting in 1958, Professor Tombaugh taught astronomy at New Mexico State University for 15 years.
18. In 1960 he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Astronomy degree from Northern Arizona university.
19. in 1979 he published his autobiography, Out of the Darkness: The Planet Pluto
20. On January 17. 1997, America lost one of her best and brightest as Dr. Tombaugh died.
(source: Wikipedia, also "Clyde Tombaugh and the Search for Planet X" by M. Wetterer, Carolrhoda Books, Inc., 1996, also "Common Sense Planets", Joseph B. Allen in The Space Review, 2005)
