In 1925, a Kansas farm boy built a telescope from scratch and found Pluto five years later

Long before Clyde Tombaugh was searching the skies from an observatory in Arizona, he was a farm boy trying to make sense of the night above his family's home. The first telescope he owned was bought from Sears, but it soon failed to satisfy him. By 1925, he was building his own instruments, with help from his father, who took on extra work to pay for the materials. Tombaugh kept refining them, eventually producing a 23-centimetre reflector whose mount included parts from an old Buick and a discarded cream separator.His detailed drawings of Jupiter and Mars were good enough to attract the attention of astronomers at Lowell Observatory. Instead of receiving the advice he had asked for, Tombaugh was offered a job. He arrived with no college degree and joined a painstaking search for a suspected planet beyond Neptune. Ten months later, his photographs revealed another planet, Pluto.A Kansas farm boy built his own telescope from old car and farm partsTombaugh's interest in astronomy developed during his teenage years, at a time when owning a serious telescope was well beyond what his family could easily afford. He began constructing telescopes himself in a storm shelter on the family f...