Many Unitarian Universalists have gone on long and meaningful journeys, but none has gone quite as far as Clyde Tombaugh.
Clyde was born 1906, and ever since he was little he wanted to be an astronomer. A hailstorm that destroyed the family’s crop meant that there was no money to send him to college, but he built telescopes and lenses on his own.

The astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto here shown with his homemade 9-inch telescope. Photo circa 1930, Public Domain

People at the famous Lowell Observatory were so impressed with his drawings of Jupiter and Mars that they offered him a job.

While he was working at the Lowell Observatory Clyde Tombaugh explored the sky using photographs taken through a telescope, and through a special procedure discovered that what he suspected was true—there was another planet out beyond Neptune.

Although that planet, Pluto, was later reclassified as a dwarf planet, it was an important discovery about our solar system.

What about the longest journey? Well, Clyde Tombaugh died in 1997, at the age of 90. He was cremated, and some of his ashes went onto the New Horizons spacecraft that made it all the way to Pluto, and recently sent us back stunning pictures of the dwarf planet at the edge of our solar system.

Truly an amazing journey!