Clyde Tombaugh

Clyde Tombaugh-

Clyde Tombaugh was born in 1906 to an Illinois farm family. He received an offer to come to Lowell to work as a junior astronomer. Clyde accepted the job and joined the search for Percival Lowell's "Planet X", a planet beyond Neptune. Clyde Tombaugh's job was to photograph one small piece of the night sky at a time. He then had to carefully examine and compare the photos in an effort to detect an unidentified moving point of light that might be a planet. Clyde Tombaugh photographed 65% of the sky and spent thousands of hours examining photographs of the night sky. After ten months of very hard work, sometimes working through the night in an unheated dome, Clyde Tombaugh discovered an object he named Pluto. For many years, Pluto was considered to be the ninth planet in our solar system. However, as astronomers learned more about the planets and also about a new group of objects known as the Kuiper Belt Objects, it became clear that Pluto was more like the objects in that belt than the other eight planets. In August 2006, Pluto was re-classified as a dwarf planet.
Clyde Tombaugh died at the age of ninety on January 17, 1997.

Source: http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/whos_who_level2/tombaugh.html