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Get outta town: Visit the mausoleum of Percival Lowell, who mapped Mars’ nonexistent canals Astronomer set the stage for the discovery of Pluto Northern Arizona has all sorts of cool natural wonders — the red rock buttes of Sedona, Monument Valley, Meteor Crater, the Petrified Desert, that Grand Canyon thing. But once you get bored of marveling at Earth’s surface, one of the most fascinating places to go is Flagstaff’s Lowell Observatory. Located above the city at over 7,000 feet, the complex has a bunch of interactive exhibits, educational scientific programs, and telescopes they’ll let you use to gaze out into the cosmos. It’s also a stellar place to people watch, as it’s an active research facility with astronomers coming and going all the time. But while visitors head from the museum to the telescopes, one structure tends to go overlooked: the mausoleum of the observatory’s founder, Percival Lowell — a man who, in devoting his life to something that doesn’t exist, advanced human understanding of the universe considerably.

The canals Percival Lowell mapped on Mars’ surface later turned out to be an optical illusion.

Lowell studied math, ran a cotton mill, and traveled extensively in Asia, eventually serving as a foreign secretary

A wealthy Bostonian born in 1855,

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and counselor for a Korean diplomatic mission to the United States. But then in the 1890s, he read French spiritualist and science writer Camille Flammarion’s “The Planet Mars and Its Conditions of Habitability” and “Life on Mars,” a book featuring the Martian observations of Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli in 1877. The latter detailed a complex system of canals that Schiaparelli had observed on Mars’ surface, and upon reading about them, Lowell was obsessed. The astronomer figured that the existence of a system of canals implied a deliberately-constructed irrigation or transportation system – and thus the Martians who built them. So he moved out to Arizona, built the observatory that still bears his name, and began mapping every canal he could see on the red planet.

Courtesy of Michael-Rainabba Richardson/Wikimedia Commons

»»  Percival Lowell’s mausoleum in Flagstaff, Arizona, features a glass dome through which star light can shine. Lowell may have been misguided when it comes to Mars, and Venus, but his study of astronomy and the construction of the observatory actually paid off. During the last decade of his life, he shifted his focus to the search for Planet X, a proposed planet in our solar system beyond the orbits of Uranus and Neptune. Lowell died in 1916, having never found that hypothetical planet. In 1930, Clyde Tombaugh, another astronomer searching for Planet X at Lowell Observatory, discovered Pluto. (Sure, it’s no longer considered a full-fledged planet, but it was a major discovery nonetheless.)

Meanwhile, Lowell’s idea that an alien had built canals across Mars’ desert, maybe even dying surface. influenced pop culture for more than a century. H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds” and Ray Astronomy has advanced considerably Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles” since Lowell’s day, to the point where both owe at least part of their existence we’ve actually sent robots to Mars, to Lowell. The astronomer’s mausoleand it turns out the canals were just an um on the observatory campus, which optical illusion. There’s no liquid water features a glass dome through which its on the planet’s surface, and definitely, occupant can gaze out upon the stars, is no Martians as far as we can tell. Oops. even alluded to in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ (Lowell also tried to map Venus – which “John Carter of Mars” series and the has an opaque atmosphere that renders (unfairly maligned) 2012 movie. the surface impossible to see from Earth As a result of the COVID-19 epidemic, — describing it as having spoke-like Lowell Observatory is currently going features that radiated out from a central through a phased reopening process, so dark spot. Scientists later figured out check what’s open before visiting it. that Lowell was looking at an image of his own eye.) —— Nick Gonzales