April 5…. To infinity and beyond

Today we visited the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff. Founded in 1894 by Percival Lowell, there have been a number of major discoveries coming from there.

Percy Lowell himself “discovered” the canal systems stretching across the surface of Mars, and speculated about entire civilizations on Mars, leading to the entire genre of Martian storytelling. Even though the canals were later disproved, the Edgar Rice Burroughs stories live on.

In 1930, Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto, at that time classified as our solar systems ninth planet, and demoted in 2006 to “dwarf planet”. Not sure exactly what the line is between “planet” and “dwarf planet”. 🤔

We watched an outdoor planetarium show, where we were shown constellations and given a lot of information about exo-planets. Since the first was discovered in 1992, over 5800 planets have now been found circling other stars.

We met and talked to an actual astrophysicist, who explained some of the research going on at the observatory.

And my favorite part, we got to see the original telescope used by Percy Lowell back in 1896 as he made his Mars observations, which is still in use today.