Lowell Observatory

Percival Lowell founded the observatory partly out of a fascination with Mars. He was captivated by the idea that the red planet was crossed by canals built by an intelligent civilization, and he chose Flagstaff's high, dry air and dark skies as an ideal place to study it. Though his canals turned out to be an illusion of the eye and the atmosphere, his choice of site was inspired, and it drew serious astronomy to northern Arizona.

Lowell used his fortune to build a first-rate research station on the mountain, equipping it with a great refracting telescope housed under a wooden dome. His enthusiasm and money gave the observatory its start, and his belief that something waited to be found beyond the known planets would, years after his death, bear remarkable fruit.

Lowell had predicted an undiscovered planet tugging at the orbits of Neptune and Uranus, which he called Planet X, and he searched for it without success. The hunt continued after he died, and in 1930 a young Kansas farm-raised astronomer named Clyde Tombaugh, comparing photographic plates of the sky taken nights apart, spotted a tiny point of light that had moved. It was a new world, and it was named Pluto.

The discovery made headlines around the globe and put Lowell Observatory in the history books. Visitors today can see the telescope and the plate-comparing machine that made it possible, and stand in the dome where a patient search across the winter sky added a ninth body to the solar system, a place of pilgrimage for anyone who has ever looked up and wondered what lies out there.

Lowell Observatory played a part in an even larger discovery. In the early twentieth century the astronomer Vesto Slipher, working here, measured the light of distant spiral nebulae and found that most of them were rushing away from us at enormous speed. His measurements were among the first hard clues that the universe is not static but expanding, a finding that reshaped our whole understanding of the cosmos.

That work, less famous than Pluto but arguably more profound, cemented the observatory's place at the frontier of astronomy. From this pine-topped hill came evidence that would help lead others to the idea of a universe born in a single beginning and growing ever since, a reminder that great discoveries can come from a modest mountaintop far from any city.

The observatory endures in part because Flagstaff has protected the very thing that drew Lowell here: darkness. The city was the first in the world to be named an International Dark Sky City, passing laws to limit light pollution so the stars stay bright overhead, a rare civic commitment that keeps its skies among the finest near any American town.

That heritage makes an evening at Lowell special. On clear nights, staff open the domes and set up telescopes for the public, guiding visitors to the moon, the planets, star clusters, and distant galaxies. Set high in the cool pines above the desert, with the Milky Way arching overhead, it is a place that connects the great discoveries of the past to the simple wonder of looking up at a truly dark sky.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.