Real-World Python

5FINDING PLUTO

According to Woody Allen, 80 percent of success is just showing up. This certainly describes the success of Clyde Tombaugh, an untrained Kansas farm boy growing up in the 1920s. With a passion for astronomy but no money for college, he took a stab in the dark and mailed his best astronomical sketches to Lowell Observatory. To his great surprise, he was hired as an assistant. A year later, he had discovered Pluto and gained eternal glory!

Percival Lowell, the famous astronomer and founder of Lowell Observatory, had postulated the presence of Pluto based on perturbations in the orbit of Neptune. His calculations were wrong, but by ...