City of Flagstaff – Office of the Mayor Proclamation
WHEREAS, We are celebrating the grand reopening of the Lawrence Lowell Telescope, commonly known as the Pluto Discovery Telescope and the instrument that Clyde Tombaugh used to discover Pluto in 1930; and
WHEREAS, Percival Lowell began searching for a 9th planet in 1905 and spent much time during the last decade of his life in this pursuit and in 1928, more than a decade after Lowell’s death, observatory Sole Trustee Roger Putnam and Director V.M. Slipher decided to recommence the planet search and contracted with the Alvan Clark & Sons firm of Massachusetts to design a three-element, 13-inch diameter lens; and
WHEREAS, Lowell Observatory staff, under the guidance of instrument maker Stanley Sykes, built the telescope and dome to house the telescope and Percival Lowell’s brother, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, who was then serving as president of Harvard University, donated the money to fund construction of the telescope and dome. He normally went by his middle name, Lawrence, and the telescope was thus officially named the Lawrence Lowell Telescope; and
WHEREAS, Observatory staff began installing the telescope on February 11, 1929 and took the first exposure with it on February 16. After spending several weeks testing and adjusting the telescope, assistant Clyde Tombaugh began using it for the planet search on April 6, 1929. On February 18, 1930, Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto while examining photographic plates of the sky he took with the telescope; and
WHEREAS, The telescope was later used to study comets and asteroids, search for small natural satellites of Earth and the moon, and carry out a massive survey of stellar positions. In 1970, the telescope was moved from its original dome to Lowell Observatory’s Anderson Mesa dark sky site. In 1993, the telescope was brought back to Mars Hill and reinstalled in its original dome so that guests from around the world could visit this historic instrument; and
WHEREAS, In 2017, the telescope and dome underwent a yearlong renovation by a team consisting of observatory staff Ted Dunham, Ralph Nye, Peter Rosenthal, Glenn Hill, Dave Schuck, and Jeff Gehring and that is what brings us here to celebrate today.
NOW, THEREFORE, I, CORAL EVANS, MAYOR OF THE CITY OF FLAGSTAFF, ARIZONA, hereby do proclaim
March 10, 2018 as Lawrence Lowell Telescope day,
In Flagstaff, Arizona.
DATED this 10th Day of March, 2018
______MAYOR
ATTEST:
_ CLERK