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First page of a paper by Nicholson and Mayall from 1931 discussing the orbit of Pluto. The last sentence of the first paragraph reads: "The only photographs which could show images of the newly discovered object were four of a series begun in December, 1919, by M. L. Humason in a search for trans-Neptunian planets."

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First page of a paper by Nicholson and Mayall from 1931 discussing the orbit of Pluto. The last sentence of the first paragraph reads: "The only photographs which could show images of the newly discovered object were four of a series begun in December, 1919, by M. L. Humason in a search for trans-Neptunian planets."
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Robert McNees (mcnees@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 19-Aug-2024 16:19:49 UTC Robert McNees
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Besides working with Hubble, Humason collaborated with Fritz Zwicky, Allan Sandage, and many other noted astronomers.
Humason also famously *missed* discovering Pluto eleven years before Clyde Tombaugh!
He captured it on four plates in 1919 but didn’t realize a tiny planet was sailing across his photographs.
Ref: https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?1931ApJ....73....1N&data_type=PDF_HIGH&whole_paper=YES&type=PRINTER&filetype=.pdf

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