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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."
COuld someone just accept Pluto and Sedna as planets regardless of size?
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my university could use this telescope. I go to Texas Tech, and our observatory is now in the middle of a lit up parking lot. The other one fell off of its artillery mount. We have a few reflecting scopes, the kind you carry around, but this would be a neat monument/useful tool. Bah' It seems all my school wants to improve is its 256 billion $ football stadium... Still, perhaps the right place for this is a non elite school
And Pluto was discovered by Percival Lowell, thus the "PL" symbol for the planet Pluto.
I seem to remember that Lowell used a standard refracting telescope which was something like 6m long. anyone got a link to a picture?
...and lectures in astronomy. I do quite a bit of photography and I'd read somewhere that Leica lenses (generally considered to be the best 35mm lenses available) are ground to an accuracy of about half a wavelength of light - say 200nm. He just shrugged and said his lenses are accurate to better than 1/10 wavelength. He designed and built the lens grinding machine himself, so he should know.
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In this article, it says the mirror for the telescope was ground by the astronomer himself. However, in my family it has always been said that the LENS in the telescope used to discover Pluto was ground by my great-grandfather, Napoleon Carreau. I know nothing about astronomy or the history book version of Pluto's discovery, so I'm a little confused. I was also under the impression that the "planet X" telescope was in a museum right now. Is it possible that this telescope uses a lense in addition to a mirror? Or perhaps that the telescope my great-grandfather helped make was a completely different one? Or something else that I'm not considering?
I grew up in Las Cruces and my Dad was a professor at NMSU. We lived about half a mile from Dr. Tombaugh and when I was a teen he invited me to come see this telescope. We looked at mars and venus that night. Really impressive.
He was also a good teacher and nice guy.Later he lectured a 101 level astronomy class on the discovery of pluto, that my wife took.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
According to Tombaugh The name Pluto was used mostly as a reference to the god pluto
from this http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/tom0int-2 interview...
How did you name it Pluto?
Pluto was the god of the underworld.
The lower world, I guess it would be better to say -- of Hades. Pluto's out there far from the sun, where sunlight, at the average distance, is only one sixteen-hundredth as bright as on earth. Rather dark. And if you think of Hades as a dimly lighted place or outer darkness, it kind of fits in somewhat with the characteristics of Pluto probably, or of Hades. So it seemed fairly appropriate from that standpoint. And then when the satellite of Pluto was discovered in 1978 by Christy at the Naval Observatory, he named it Charon because his wife's name was Charlene. Charon was the boatman who ferried the souls of the dead across the river Styx to Pluto's realm of Hades. So the satellite name fits in very well with Pluto, you see.
The almanac says that the name came from the initials Percival Lowell.
Well, that was another reason, but not the main reason. Of course, they used the first two letters, Percival Lowell. But that was not the main reason. That was somewhat of a coincidence.
I think this telescope of his is of more interest to museums than the one for sale.
There's no reason to think it wouldn't be every bit as good as a new 16" scope. An inch of mirror diameter is the same size then as now, the quality just depends on how well it was ground. Mirror grinding hasn't changed significantly in 100+ years except people are using machines for the tedious parts now (they're not more accurate, just less tedious). There's no reason in the world to assume that this scope isn't every bit as good as any new scope.
At worst, the mirror may need stripping and recoating, but that's normal maintenance.
I have a 15" scope that I just built 3 years ago; I'd bet the views are almost identical. This is an equitorially mounted scope, so it's in a way better than mine, though I can put mine in my car in 10 minutes.
I hope that this scope goes to a group that will take good care of it, and hopefully let the public use it. Any telescope that's being looked through by the public, especially kids, is going to waste. I think Clyde would have liked that.