A little history

[kubandalum]

I was privileged at KU to take the last class of N.W. Storer, Professor of Astronomy. The same law that forced Phog Allen to retire before he could coach Wilt forced Storer to retire at age 70.

Storer had lots of stories. He told us that Kansas farmboy Clyde Tombaugh had built his own telescope, and had sent drawings he had made of his observations to an observatory. The observatory hired him as an assistant and put him on the tedious drudge work of comparing photographs of the sky through the blink microscope in the attempt to find a ninth planet where it was predicted to be. Two photographs, taken days apart, are put under the microscope, perfectly aligned, and turning a little knob back and forth causes a mirror to switch from one photo to the other. The photographs look the same, except that if anything in the photos has moved in between times that the photos were taken, then the thing that moved will appear to jump back and forth when flipping the mirror. After many weeks of that and without a college education Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto, then he went to KU to get his degree where he was a student of Storer. Another student of Storer was a member of the team that discovered plutonium. Pluto and Plutonium.

[I read elsewhere that Tombaugh’s home-built telescope had parts from a manure spreader in its mount.]

Storer also told us that he and a colleague had once calculated the orbit of Mars as a summer project. Working side by side, checking each other’s math along the way, it took them six weeks. In the 1960s he fed the data into a computer, and the computer did it in 63 seconds.

Cool guy. My favorite professor at KU.