I guess I’ll tell this story one more time I’ve been posting it on some Pluto related threads. We moved to El Paso from Germany while I was in the Military. I have always been interested in Sci Fi, like you we watched Sputnick and were carried away by the space program. My job before we moved back to Ft. Bliss was that of a missile unit evaluator for NATO AAFCE at times and all the time for US Units. A lot off our work was done at night. I got interested in star gazing, my wife gave me a Walkman Astronomy tape so I was able to figure out all those stars I had been seeing on all those nights.
When we got home to the US I looked to Join an Astronomy club but there
was not a one in El Paso at the time, 1990, so I joined the closest one which was in Las Cruses. So I went to meetings there and to Star Parties I found the type of scope that would fit my needs bought one and had a great time observing.
One of our Observing sites was Upham, NM about 40 miles north of Las Cruses, which is now the home of Spaceport America. Anyway, I found out that we had a unique member of the club Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto. He was a very interesting guy to say the least. Always friendly with an engaging smile. I got to sit next to him a couple of times and saw him sporting this huge Walt Disney Pluto watch. It was very big and I often wondered if it was specialy made for him. He gave several talks about his Astronomy career. One of them was presenting all his hand drawn maps of Mars done at the Lowell Observatory in AZ the same Scope he used to find Pluto.
If you had seen pictures of him in his youth, it was kind of a shock to see him as a severely hunchbacked small of stature person that he had become. But he still seemed happy. Later he got too frail to come anymore and passed in 97. As I sit here typing a little bit of his ashes will soon pass by Pluto. God speed Clyde!
Well I’m glad you decided to post your story one more time because I missed it when you posted on other Pluto threads.
VERY cool that you wound up joining the same astronomy club that Clyde was a member of and got to know him.
I’m lovin’ the fact some of his cremains are on New Horizons. His family members must have had goose bumps this morning, knowing he was zipping past Pluto.
I’ll be glued to the NASA channel this evening with all appendages crossed that the all-clear comes through from the spacecraft.
I'm old enough to remember looking at the moon as a child and being told by my Dad that no one had ever seen the far side. When the Soviets had a spaceship that sent back photos of the far side for the first time, my mother thought they had faked them.