Lowell Observatory

And not only pictures, but like live.

Like, where did we go right after that? Lowell Observatory in Arizona.

And I was standing around there and I was like, Oh, hi, there you are.

Yeah, I see you guys again.

Susmita stood at the edge of the crater and looked down into a massive bowl of rock and earth, a reminder of how powerful and random the universe can be.

The day continued in Flagstaff, where the Lowell Observatory offers a chance to see the night sky through historic telescopes.

Sasmita did not stay long because she had a detour in mind.

Sedona, just an hour away.

In the early 20th century, Percival Lowell conducted an extended search for a ninth planet, but was unsuccessful.

After his death, his successor Clyde Tombaugh continued the search by systematically photographing the heavens night after night at Lowell Observatory.

Since planets move relative to the background stars, any undiscovered planet would appear in a different location in two images taken at different dates.

Tombaugh used a machine called a blink comparator that would allow him to switch plates back and forth, hoping that the eye would be able to detect any star that appeared to move between the two plates.

He built himself an observatory and dedicated his career to studying Mars.

The Lowell Observatory is famous for the discovery of Pluto, but that was later.

Lowell was obsessed with the Martian canals.

He spent 15 years making sophisticated drawings of its surface.

So he got the idea that what he needed to do was get photographs of them, because for the most part, you just had people drawing pictures of Mars, because astrophotography was not very well developed at that time.

But Lowell, who I don't think we've said this yet, founded the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, which is still there today.

He founded the Lowell Observatory in 1894 specifically to study Mars.

And this is the inheritance

of this time.

Carl Sagan.

Oh, there are so many people, yeah.

Yeah, so speak to that because like the Lowell Observatory, Like the photography, the notion of moving a multi-ton telescope around the world, not only is there concrete science born of this, but then there are future scientists inspired by it.

You can see forever.

Have you been to the Lowell Observatory and seen his quotations on his mausoleum? I have

not.

I've been up there and I've taken some photographs, but I've I probably should go back, and I know they have some other exhibits there now, including a Route 66 exhibit, so it's worth a visit.

I love this mountain town.

It just came natural for me when I was first getting into writing fiction and I wrote Mars Hail Murder about a murder that happened up at what I call the Flagstaff Observatory, which is Lowell Observatory in reality.

And that's not based on a real murder, by the way.

These are all made up from my brain.

So I call that Caboose Coffee.

And all these people were kind of reading it like a puzzle, like, what's that? Which place is that? And, you know, I couldn't say NAU.

I couldn't say Lowell Observatory, as I mentioned before.

So that's been really fun.

A young scientist named Clyde, I think, Clyde, I hope I didn't butcher his name and the pronunciation.

So he was working at an observatory in the United States, a place called Lowell Observatory, and he spotted something, which was a tiny dot moving slowly across the sky, something no one had ever seen before, and people loved it.

Pluto is special.

It was the newest planet.

We put it on T-shirts.

We make festivals for it.

Lowell Observatory, where Pluto was first seen and discovered, actually holds a whole multi-day celebration called I Heart Pluto Festival every single year.

And people show up just to celebrate this little dwarf planet that technically is not a planet anymore.

But what I like so much about the Americana is it's purposefully funny.

Like Flagstaff as the first international dark sky city with Lowell Observatory and all of their like lunar legacy that Flagstaff has, the folks at the Americana put a like statue of a guy in a NASA space suit right out front.

And that's cute.

And then I think that might even be the place that has a disco ball in every room.