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The planets are never the same twice, they're always different, so they could compare the markings I had drawn with their current photographs and they knew that I was drawing what I was really seeing and it wasn't copied from somewhere.

Clyde Tombaugh

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Clyde Tombaugh
Age: 90 †
Born: 1906
Born: February 4
Died: 1997
Died: January 17
Astronomer
University Teacher
Streator
Illinois
Clyde William Tombaugh
Clyde W. Tombaugh
Wasn
Twice
Knew
Current
Seeing
Currents
Different
Compare
Really
Drawing
Markings
Always
Photograph
Copied
Never
Somewhere
Photographs
Planets
Drawn

More quotes by Clyde Tombaugh

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To me, the noise of a threshing machine is better music than a lot of music I hear nowadays. I took a man's place in the threshing crew when I was only 14 years old.
Clyde Tombaugh
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Unfortunately, a lot of the concepts in the Bible are based on ancient mythology that doesn't fit the findings of science.
Clyde Tombaugh
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I think the driving thing was curiosity about the universe. That fascinated me. I didn't think anything about being famous or anything like that, I was just interested in the concepts involved.
Clyde Tombaugh
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I was always looking ahead. I used to do all kinds of things for entertainment. When I was young, we had no radio, no TV. We were 30 miles from the public library, out in the sticks in Western Kansas, and so I'd do arithmetic exercises.
Clyde Tombaugh
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I doubt that the phenomenon was any terrestrial reflection, because... nothing of the kind has ever appeared before or since... I was so unprepared for such a strange sight that I was really petrified with astonishment.
Clyde Tombaugh
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I was interested in telescopes and the way they worked because I had an intense desire to see what things looked like, so I learned how to use telescopes and find things in the sky.
Clyde Tombaugh
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I have a lot of sympathy for young people because I realize how disturbed I was. How would I deal with life in the future? What would I do for a living?
Clyde Tombaugh
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I guess the two things I was most interested in were telescopes and steam engines. My father was an engineer on a threshing rig steam engine and I loved the machinery.
Clyde Tombaugh
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When I was in the fourth grade, I became intensely interested in geography and I learned it well.
Clyde Tombaugh
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How does a pansy, for example, select the ingredients from soil to get the right colors for the flower? Now there's a great miracle. I think there's a supreme power behind all of this. I see it in nature.
Clyde Tombaugh
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I think there's a supreme power behind the whole thing, an intelligence. Look at all of the instincts of nature, both animals and plants, the very ingenious ways they survive. If you cut yourself, you don't have to think about it.
Clyde Tombaugh
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I realized that I would have some very tough sledding, and I was very discouraged because I didn't see much hope of getting into the field I wanted to get into with no college education.
Clyde Tombaugh
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You have to compete with others in the field. Sometimes the competition gets pretty fierce because you're competing for funds or grants to do your work, the financial work.
Clyde Tombaugh
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I used to think about how nice it would be to visit the planets. Of course, I didn't expect to see in my lifetime what has happened. I knew it would happen some day, but it came along faster than I at first thought.
Clyde Tombaugh
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By the time I was in sixth grade I could bound every country in the world from memory.
Clyde Tombaugh
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I guess they just took it for granted that that was what I was interested in and let nature take its course.
Clyde Tombaugh