Views from Flagstaff are ‘out of this world’

With an elevation of about 7,000 feet, Flagstaff, Ariz., is where Percival Lowell of Boston chose to build an observatory to study the planet Mars in 1894. Flagstaff was the ideal site – “remote, elevated and having few cloudy nights.” 

Lowell was a successful businessman who was obsessed with astronomy. He constructed Lowell Observatory atop a mesa that was named “Mars Hill,” when Arizona was still a U.S. territory. (Arizona was the 48th state to join the union in 1912.)

 

Percival Lowell

In 1930, Clyde Tombaugh, a young astronomer working at the observatory, discovered a new planet beyond Neptune in the Solar System. Tombaugh’s discovery was international news.

                                                                         Clyde Tombaugh

While discussing “current events” at the breakfast table with her grandfather, Venetia Burney Phair, an 11-year-old British school girl, suggested the name “Pluto.” 

“I was fairly familiar with Greek and Roman legends from various children’s books that I had read, and, of course, I did know about the…names the other planets have,” Venetia said.

 

“I suppose I just thought that this was a name that hadn’t been used,” she commented. (Pluto was the Roman god of the underworld; his two brothers, Jupiter and Neptune were already in the heavens.) 

Venetia’s grandfather was Falconer Madan, former head librarian at the University of Oxford in Oxfordshire, England. 

He passed along the idea of naming the planet Pluto to his friend Herbert Hall Turner, who was a professor of astronomy and director of the Radcliffe Observatory at Oxford. Turner, in turn, cabled the idea to the American astronomers at the Lowell Observatory. 

Roger Lowell Putnam, one of the Lowell trustees, said that because the first two letters of Pluto also are the initials of Percival Lowell, the name would be a “proper and fitting memorial” to the observatory’s founder. 

(According to outer space protocol, it was the responsibility of officials at the Lowell Observatory to select a name for the new celestial object.) 

The scientific community was quick to acknowledge: “Venetia Burney Phair comes from a family of people who name heavenly bodies.” 

Her great uncle Henry Madan named the two moons of Mars as “Phobos and Deimos” in 1877. At the time, Henry Madan was the esteemed “Science Master” of Eton College, located near Windsor in Berkshire, England. 

The moons of Mars were actually discovered by American astronomer Asaph Hall III at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. He deferred to Madan, a “professional colleague,” to come up with appropriate names for the moons. 

Hall and Madan were scientists who shared a common bond. Each had a deep scholarly interest in Greek literature. 

Phobos and Deimos, who come from ancient Greek mythology, were twin sons born to Aphrodite and Ares. Aphrodite was the goddess of love, beauty and sexuality. Ares was the god of war. 

In 2006, the International Astronomical Union downgraded Pluto from a major planet to a dwarf planet.

 

Clayton Kershaw, ace pitcher with Los Angeles Dodgers (winners of Major League Baseball’s 2020 World Series), revealed that he is the great-nephew of Clyde Tombaugh. 

Kershaw laughingly told NBC television’s Al Roker on Oct. 28, 2020: “In our family, Pluto’s still a planet.” 

Astrotourism can lead to all sorts of discoveries. 

It’s not always about looking up. 

Sometimes, astrotourism involves looking down and around. Such is the case in rural northern Arizona where astrotourists can view the massive Barringer Meteor Crater that measures about 3,900 feet in diameter and is 560 feet deep. 

The Apollo 11 moon mission astronauts trained here in the 1960s.