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Pluto's Discoverer's Backyard Telescope For Sale
Schart writes "My dad, an amateur astronomer/astrophotographer, sent me this link detailing the potential selling of Clyde Tombaugh (the man who discovered Pluto)'s backyard telescope. It features a 16 inch f/10 mirror which was hand-ground by the astronomer himself as well as a massive superstructure and 1-ton tube."
Perhaps, some philantrophist can buy this piece of history to donate to a museum? Such pieces of history deserve more exposure than in the home of a private collector.
No, but it does come with "hey I got Clyde Tombaugh's telescope" bragging rights.
The problem my friend is that we will discover dozens more in that size range. It is terribly inconvenient, and pretty inaccurate, to momorize the list of 30-50 planets when clearly there is a difference between merc-neptune and the rest. we need to chance the way we picture the solar system. it isnt a defined planet of ten spheres that suddenly stop. it goes on and on and on and thins to the point where its just arbitrary to define the end. no problem naming the solar orbital objects sedna and pluto and etc, but its impractical to classify every such thing a planet just to make scientists feel warm
COuld someone just accept Pluto and Sedna as planets regardless of size?
Why? Because it gives you a warm fuzzy feeling? Will you still feel the same when the 10'000th Kuiper Belt "planet" the size of Sedna will be discovered? And it will, eventually - there's a huge amount of ill-light space that far from the sun, and we've barely scratched the surface of all that's bound to be lurking out there. We should really reserve a term (or two) to denote a) the four sizeable rocky bodies orbiting the sun inside the asteroid belt, and b) the four gas giants orbiting the sun between the asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt.
Pluto is a special case: on one hand it looks like what we would expect from a typical Kuiper belt object (KBO), on the other it is bound to be the closest large KBO by far. Historically it was discovered (the same as Neptune) by its perturbative effect on another planet's orbit, long before any other KBOs, so it gets grandfathered in as an honorary "planet". Fair enough.
Sedna, on the other hand, is three times (!) as far out from the sun as Pluto; at that distance we expect to find thousands of KBOs of comparable size. Calling them all "planets" would be like starting to call all schools of whatever level "university" - a status grab that would ultimately achieve nothing but a devaluation of the more prestigious term, and a muddling of the underlying factual distinctions.
Be faithful to your obsessions. Identify them and be faithful to them, let them guide you like a sleepwalker. JG Ballard
PL is for Perceval Lowell, but Tombaugh was the discoverer. He used Lowell's calculations, which he trusted so much that he SCOURED the area where X should have been, and managed to find a KBO decades before he had any right to. Even so, it wasn't quite where Lowell said it would be. That's pure, unadulterated, good observing. That's why this is such an interesting scope: because it was built by a guy who was good enough to discover something very, very new.