Born Feb. 4, 1906, Clyde Tombaugh grew up on farms in Illinois and Kansas. Tombaugh couldn’t afford to attend college – though he eventually completed his bachelor’s (1936) and master’s (1939) degree while he was working – but taught himself astronomy and optics. He built his own telescopes out of old farm machinery and car parts including the crankshaft from his father’s 1910 Buick, even digging a cellar (which doubled as the family’s tornado shelter) where he could grind telescopes in a temperature-controlled environment. In 1928, Tombaugh sent detailed drawings of Mars and Jupiter to Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. The images, created with Tombaugh’s homemade 9-inch reflector, so impressed director V.M. Slipher that he offered Tombaugh a job.
At Lowell, Tombaugh would make his most famous discovery: the ninth planet (now classified as a dwarf planet), Pluto. But he also discovered hundreds of variable stars, asteroids, star clusters, and a nova, and documented over 29,000 galaxies. When Lowell was unable to continue his employment after World War II, Tombaugh began working in missile-tracking at White Sands Proving Ground, finally ending up at New Mexico State University, where he founded the Astronomy Department in 1955. He stayed at NMSU until he retired in 1973, and continued observing with his homemade telescope until his death in 1997. The New Horizons spacecraft, which flew past Pluto in 2015, carried some of his ashes.
