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| Tombaugh and Homemade Telescope (PD) |
Closer and closer, rounder and rounder, what’s a dwarf planet without a founder?
As the New Horizons spacecraft hurtles toward Pluto, it carries with it an ounce of astronomer Clyde Tombaugh’s cremated remains. This seems only fitting, as it was Tombaugh who first discovered the existence of this faraway world.
Turns out that Pluto wasn’t all that he founded. Right here on Earth, Tombaugh also helped to found the Unitarian Universalist Church of Las Cruces, New Mexico.
Kimberly French of UUWorld
reports that Tombaugh and his wife had previously “visited Unitarian churches in Kansas.” After the
Tombaughs moved to Las Cruces in 1955, they teamed up with students from the University of New Mexico to form a new church.
Here are two of the church’s guiding principles: A free and responsible search
for truth and meaning. Respect for the interdependent
web of all existence of which we are a part.
These two principles seem particularly compatible with the life that Tombaugh led. In 1929, he diligently began a search for predecessor Percival Lowell’s “Planet X.” Only about a year later, he remarkably “found a tiny dot, orbiting very close to Lowell’s prediction.”
This “dot” was the heavenly body we now call Pluto. Just as Tombaugh long ago welcomed Pluto, Pluto is now about to welcome Tombaugh.
As they say in the solar system, “What goes around comes around.”
Resources
http://www.uuchurchlc.org/who-are-unitarian-universalists/understanding-our-principles/
http://www.uuworld.org/articles/tombaugh-discovered-pluto
Copyright July 13, 2015 by Linda Van Slyke All Rights Reserved
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