Discoverer of Pluto

The farm northwest of Burdett is where Clyde Tombaugh, whose family moved there in 1922, built telescopes from 1926 and where a hailstorm in June 1928 ruined the family's crops. He mailed his drawings of Jupiter and Mars to Lowell Observatory, which hired him in 1929, and he found Pluto on February 18, 1930. The plaque's outermost planet no longer holds: on August 24, 2006, the International Astronomical Union reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet. That year New Horizons launched with a portion of his ashes aboard, passing Pluto on July 14, 2015.

What the plaque says

Discoverer of Pluto Burdett is the boyhood home of Dr. Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of the planet Pluto. Born in Illinois in 1906, he grew up on a farm northwest of here and was graduated from Burdett High School in 1925. During his youth, Tombaugh explored the heavens with homemade telescopes. Later he was hired by Lowell Observatory, Flagstaff, Arizona, and discovered Pluto, the outermost planet in our solar system, in 1930. During his planet search, Tombaugh photo- graphed 65 percent of the sky and spent 7,000 hours examining about 90 million star images. Besides Pluto, his discoveries included six star clusters, one cloud of galaxies, one comet and about 775 asteroids. Few astronomers have seen so much of the universe in such minute detail. Dr. Tombaugh earned degrees from the Univer- sity of Kansas and Northern Arizona University. He concluded his career as an astronomy professor at New Mexico State University. Burdett American Legion 1982

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Larned National Historic Site — 17 mi
  Nine sandstone buildings of 1866-68 on the Pawnee Fork, a post that guarded the Santa Fe Trail and served as the agency where the Plains nations came for the annuities promised at Medicine Lodge.
• Santa Fe Trail Center — 21 mi
  Pawnee County's museum and archive two miles west of Larned, ten buildings on ten acres that carry the story from the trail years into the town that grew up beside Fort Larned.

More markers nearby

• Camp Criley 1872 — 17 mi
• Fort Hays--Fort Dodge Trail — 19 mi
• Battle of Coon Creek — 20 mi
• Birthplace of Farm Credit — 23 mi