01. When and how was it discovered when it's so far away? (A K2S Question)

From The Space Library

Pluto wasn't easy to find. Percival Lowell, at his observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, had predicted the existence of a planet beyond Neptune in the early 1900s because he thought some unknown planet was pulling Neptune slightly off-course. He made some searches in the parts of the sky where he thought the planet might be, but without success. Lowell died in 1916, but Lowell Observatory resumed the search in 1929 with a new purpose-built telescope, and hired amateur astronomer Clyde Tombaugh to do the work. Tombaugh took long-exposure photographs of the sky, looking for any point of light that moved. After many months of patient searching he found Pluto in early 1930. The odd thing is that we now know that the observations of Neptune were faulty and there is no additional planet pulling it off course—and Pluto is too small to affect Neptune's orbit anyway. So the search was successful even though the observations that led to the search were incorrect.

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Answer provided by Dr. John Spencer, Ph.D.

Question and Answer extracted from the book Kids to Space - by Lonnie Schorer

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