On the 15 March 1980 episode of The Sky at Night, Patrick Moore spoke to one of the heroes of his youth, Clyde Tombaugh, who had discovered Pluto 50 years previously in 1930.
An amateur astronomer withdegree, Tombaugh was nonetheless given a job at the Lowell Observatory after sending them drawings he'd made of Mars and Jupiter. Their detail so impressed the observatory staff that he was given the role of operating their new 13-inch refractor. Now known as the Pluto Telescope, it was specifically designed to look for signs of a new planet at the edge of the Solar System.
