Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2020

8 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2020 HISTORY lead to the discovery of the hypothetical planet, but Airy refused them, justifying it by the fact that he was leaving for a trip to the continent. That journey began on August 10th, so the As- tronomer Royal would have had plenty of time to point a telescope at the coordinates indicated by Le Verrier. Le Verrier received no better atten- tion in his homeland, so he decided to turn to a young astronomer at the Berlin Observatory whom he had known previously, Johann Gottfried Galle. On September 23, 1846, im- mediately after receiving Le Ver- rier’s request, Galle, together with Heinrich Louis d’Arrest, opened the dome of the Fraunhofer 9-inch re- fractor and aimed the instrument towards the area of the sky where the planet was supposed to be. After some initial difficulties with June 1846, Airy became aware of them, he did not care to inform Le Verrier of Adams’ previous work. Incredibly, at the end of that same month, Le Verrier was willing to pro- vide the celestial coordinates that would P hotographs of the construc- tion of the first Flagstaff Obser- vatory facility, commissioned by Percival Lawrence Lowell in 1894. [Lowell Observa- tory Archives]