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Institution

Lowell Observatory

A well-lit observatory with a large dome and steps leading up to its entrance stands prominently against a dark night sky.

Private astronomical observatory founded in 1894 by the Boston aristocrat Percival Lowell on Mars Hill above Flagstaff, Arizona, originally to study what Lowell believed were Martian canals. Pluto was discovered there in 1930. Less famously, it was where Vesto Slipher built the radial-velocity dataset for spiral nebulae that underwrote the discovery of the expanding universe.

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