Eighty years ago today, a young American astronomer discovered tiny Pluto. Clyde Tombaugh was searching for a predicted ‘Planet X’ that might explain oddities in the orbits of Neptune and Uranus. Tombaugh spent months painstakingly photographing the same sections of sky and studying the images with a blink comparator. On 18 Feburary 1930, he noticed that on photographs taken a few nights apart that January, one ‘star’ had moved, indicating that it was actually a nearby object moving against the fixed […]
Space Curator Doug Millard reminisces about the day the public was able to get up close to the Apollo 10 command module.
Alison Boyle, Keeper of Science Collections, celebrates Galileo Galilei’s discovery of Jupiter’s moons.
Keeper of Technology and Engineering David Rooney takes a closer look at the V2 engine.